Heritage and Social Prescribing - Historic England's learnings from pilots and collaborative work across sectors 2023-2024

The last five years have seen an increased awareness and growing evidence about the potential of social prescribing to help address health inequalities and help take some of the pressures off the National Health Service (NHS). Consequently, more and more organisations (including those in the heritage sector) looked to enhance their wellbeing provision and link up to local social prescribing services, where possible. Historic England has invested heavily in its own learning and development around wellbeing and social prescribing, especially since the publication of the 2022-2025 Wellbeing and Heritage Strategy in 2022 (Historic England 2022; 2026). It established a partnership with the National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP) and commissioned several innovative social prescribing pilots, testing NASP's 'whole systems approach' to social prescribing (Bolton 2023).

The Heritage Connectors and Heritage Buddies pilots (Historic England 2025) aimed to test the potential of local heritage to be used for social prescribing via different types of volunteering - Heritage Connectors used the successful Frome Community Connectors model, training everyday community members to signpost people in need to points of information about the heritage wellbeing activities available locally; while the Heritage Buddies in Nottingham took inspiration from Nature Buddies (tested previously there by Natural England as part of the Green Social Prescribing programme) and trained volunteers in local heritage or voluntary organisations to support people in need in accessing heritage wellbeing activities. Both pilots tried to apply NASP's 'whole-community approach to social prescribing', looking to strengthen the connectivity between the different elements of the social prescribing ecosystem and improve people's access to activities and support. Heritage Connectors created the first blueprint of having a heritage social prescription as an option offered by a social prescribing service hosted by a Primary Care Network (PCN), and Heritage Buddies showed how existing volunteers can link people in need to engagement with local heritage and the historic environment through social prescribing. The evaluation of the projects showed an improvement in knowledge of the link between heritage and wellbeing, and a subsequent increase in confidence in communicating this to others. Participation in the Heritage Connectors and Buddies project has also brought benefits to wellbeing and social belonging. Both pilots demonstrated the potential for scaling up, provided the recommendations outlined in the evaluation are considered (Wavehill Ltd 2024). Heritage Connectors and Heritage Buddies created toolkits and left resources and lessons learned available to anyone who is interested in applying the models on a place level.

The other heritage social prescribing pilot discussed here, The Heritage Linkworker, was developed by the Restoration Trust in Great Yarmouth and the area between 2022 and 2024 (Historic England 2025).The pilot successfully established a local social prescribing pathway for referring people with mental ill health and affected by loneliness and social isolation to heritage wellbeing activities. More than 80 local people dealing with a variety of health problems, such as depression, anxiety, isolation and decreased mobility benefitted from the Heritage 4 Health programme, developed by the project. The Heritage Linkworker project increased awareness across Norfolk's social prescribing services about the potential of heritage to deliver wellbeing and provided evidence on how it can work within social prescribing. The evaluation of the project showed that it led to a significant improvement in participants' mental health, wellbeing and physical health, and to a reduced usage of health services and medication (Make an Impact CIC 2024).

The learnings from these Historic England commissioned heritage social prescribing pilots in 2022-2023 formed the basis of the Heritage and Social Prescribing Guidance, as part of the development of the Heritage and Social Prescribing Advice Hub, published in 2025. It is hoped that this guidance will help social prescribers and heritage practitioners to understand the potential of working together and maximise the opportunities for people, helping address health inequalities and social isolation on a national and place level.

• Google Scholar
• Keywords: heritage, social prescribing, wellbeing, connectors, buddies, link worker, referral, health inequalities
• Accepted: January 2026. Published: May 2026
• Funding: This publication has been funded by the UK Government and Historic England.
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