We’re ready to support innovative and ambitious projects that share our vision for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future.

If there’s something from the past that you care for and want to pass it on to future generations, we want to hear from you.

Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive of The National Lottery Heritage Fund

What’s changed

Our Heritage 2033 strategy is centred around a simplified framework of four investment principles: saving heritage; protecting the environment; inclusion, access and participation; and organisational sustainability. You must take all four principles into account in your application. The strength of focus and emphasis on each principle is for you to decide and demonstrate.

Mindful of increased costs for goods and services, and responding to trends in our grant application data, we’ve increased our entry level grants to £10,000. This is in addition to our earlier upper threshold increase to £10m (we may even consider investing above £10m for truly exceptional heritage projects).

To simplify your experience of applying for a grant, we’ve:

• improved links between pages on our website so you can clearly see all the information you need to consider before applying
• reduced the length and complexity of our application guidance and the number of questions you must answer
• made it easier to tell us about your heritage and the project you want to deliver
• streamlined the process for grants from £10,000–£250,000 to make applying at that level more seamless
• updated our approach to paying out grants, making it easier for you to manage and deliver your project

Your opinions and expertise have been crucial to the development of Heritage 2033 and we will continue to listen and respond. We have designed an application process that can adapt to your feedback and we’ll update you when we make changes.

We remain committed to flexibility and supporting the sustainability of organisations in these challenging times. If you have urgent or exceptional needs, please contact your local team.

Connecting people and heritage

Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive of The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: “Thanks to National Lottery players, we’re able to invest £870m across our first three-year delivery plan in projects of all sizes that connect people and communities to the UK’s heritage.

“We see heritage as broad and inclusive. If there’s something from the past that you care for and want to pass it on to future generations, we want to hear from you.”

Find out more

Explore our new National Lottery Heritage Grants application guidance for grants from £10,000–£250,000 or from £250,000–£10m.

If you’re considering applying to us for the first time, start with learning more about what we fund and how to understand and explain your heritage.