Quality of Life Capital–integrating heritage and the environment in the 1990s

This paper tells the story of how heritage, nature and place came together in England in the 1990s through Quality of Life Capital, an integrated approach to placemaking, grounded in understanding what people valued. It traces the origins of Quality of Life Capital through a sequence of earlier policies that shared common themes: embedding heritage in sustainability, integrating nature and heritage, looking beyond protected sites at wider concepts of character, scenario planning and community led approaches. Quality of Life Capital was, at the time, a ‘new approach’ to environmental capital, precursor to today’s natural capital/ecosystems services model which captures the value that flows from the services provided by stocks of environmental assets. The UK Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) are currently supporting a new initiative looking at how to apply the natural capital approach to culture and heritage. This paper draws attention to the earlier work in the hope that it might be of interest not only to the culture and heritage capital programme, but also to heritage scholars interested in cultural landscapes, everyday heritage, scenario planning and community engagement.