Heritage Angel Awards Wales
The search is on for Wales’s Heritage Angels
Wales’s Heritage Minister, Dafydd Elis-Thomas, launched the awards scheme on 16 April while visiting Hetty Winding House, near Pontypridd. The Victorian steam-powered winding house transported miners and coal up and down a 360-metre (1,181foot) mine shaft until the Great Western Colliery closed in 1983. The Great Western Colliery Preservation Trust has restored the listed Winding House to working order – ‘a perfect example’ the Minister said, ‘of the sort of project that the Heritage Angel Awards Wales are designed to celebrate’.
Left to Right: Dafydd Elis-Thomas, Wales’s Heritage Minister, Brian Davies, Great Western Colliery Preservation Trust, and Christopher Catling The Secretary (CEO), RCAHMW.
The Awards have five categories:
- Best Rescue of an Historic Building or Place for projects under £5m
- Best Major Regeneration of an historic building or place for projects in excess of £5m
- Best Contribution to a Heritage Project by Young People
- Best Craftsperson or Apprentice on a Heritage Rescue or Repair Project
- Best Heritage Research, Interpretation or Recording
Anyone can nominate a person or project for the awards and the winners will be announced at a glittering awards ceremony in November 2018.
Examples of previous shortlists from outside Wales have included a dedicated volunteer who maintains historic milestones, a group of ex-servicemen who restore canals, a stonemason who has passed his skills on to hundreds of trainees, a community group that records old chapel and churchyard gravestones, and a volunteer who has developed relaxed autism-friendly tours at his local museum.
Nominating people and projects for the awards is simple: you can find full details at rcahmw.gov.uk/about-us/heritageangelawardswales. The closing date for nominations is 21 June 2018.
