English Heritage has announced it will launch an apprenticeship programme after receiving a donation of £11.2m from the Hamish Ogston Foundation.
The donation is the largest in English Heritage’s history, and the apprenticeship programme is designed to pass the skill of flint-knapping, a type of stone masonry, to a younger generation.
It plans to train 48 young heritage skills apprentices along with three professional apprentices over the next seven years.
English Heritage will directly employ most of the apprentices itself and will establish a heritage skills training centre in East Anglia, as well as an in-house heritage crafts team and “safeguard the future of 34 flint castles and abbeys in the East of England”.
Wider £29m investment
As well as the formal apprenticeships which will be developed over the next year, the centre will work to raise the profile of heritage skills as a career choice by welcoming local primary and secondary school children through school visits and onsite conservation activities.
It will highlight the opportunities of working on heritage buildings to thousands of school children and offer hands-on experience for student trainees.
Flint-knapping is listed as an endangered skill and the grant will allow English Heritage to address that skills decline by developing apprenticeships in flint and stone masonry and heritage brickwork.
Gerard Lemos, chair of English Heritage, said: “Both the landscape of East Anglia and the lives of its people have historically been defined by flint, with skills apprenticeships passed down over generations. That’s no longer happening, and both the buildings and the people have been the poorer for it. With the extremely generous support of the Hamish Ogston Foundation for which we are immensely grateful, our new skills apprenticeships will provide a radical new approach to address the decline.
“This investment is not just in the past – through saving English Heritage sites as well as homes and churches across the region – but in the future, by providing fulfilling careers for this, and subsequent generations.”
This grant to English Heritage is part of a wider £29m investment into heritage skills training in the UK and the Commonwealth which the Hamish Ogston Foundation is announcing today.
Robert Bargery, heritage project director of the Hamish Ogston Foundation, said heritage skills like flint-knapping are “the timeless threads that weave our past with our future” and the art of flint-knapping “is at a severe risk of extinction with only a handful of specialists left in the UK”.
“This latest grant from the Hamish Ogston Foundation to English Heritage will help to secure a new generation of specialists, so that we can combat this skills shortage and ensure that historic buildings at-risk can be preserved for years to come,” he added.
With around a third of its historic buildings containing flint and only a handful of skilled flint-workers remaining, East Anglia has some of the most significant conservation needs as well as the most severe shortage of heritage craft skills in the country, according to the charity.
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