Erased from the Record: The Geospatial Bias Leaving Britain's Multicultural Heritage Unmapped
Every planning decision that touches a historic building, every conservation area designation, every grant awarded under the National Lottery Heritage Fund's place-based programmes — all of these are, at some level, acts of cartography. They depend upon datasets: the National Heritage List for England, the Historic Environment Record maintained by each local authority, the Listed Buildings Online portal administered by Historic England. These datasets define, in the most literal geographic sense, what Britain considers worth remembering.
The problem is that these datasets have been compiled, curated, and maintained by institutions whose conception of heritage has been, until very recently, both narrow and exclusionary. The result is a geospatial record of Britain's past that is systematically skewed: rich in medieval ecclesiastical architecture, Georgian townscapes, and industrial monuments associated with white British history, and strikingly sparse in its documentation of the places, buildings, and landscapes that carry meaning for the nation's Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities.
This is not an accusation levelled lightly. It is a conclusion supported by the data itself.
What the Datasets Reveal — and Conceal
Historic England's National Heritage List contains approximately 400,000 entries, encompassing listed buildings, scheduled monuments, registered parks and gardens, and protected wreck sites. A 2021 analysis conducted by the Runnymede Trust, in collaboration with researchers at University College London, found that fewer than 0.3 per cent of listed building entries in England made explicit reference to Black, Asian, or minority ethnic historical associations in their list descriptions — despite the fact that communities of colour have been present in Britain since at least the Roman period, and have shaped its urban, commercial, and cultural geography continuously since the eighteenth century.
The spatial distribution of this absence is instructive. Bristol's docklands — the physical infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade, and later the site of one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean communities — contains numerous listed structures. Yet the list descriptions for the vast majority of these buildings make no reference to their role in the slave economy, the lives of the enslaved people whose labour they represent, or the Windrush-era communities who subsequently made their homes in the surrounding streets. The buildings are mapped. The history is not.
In Bradford, the textile mills that drew South Asian workers from Mirpur and Sylhet in the 1950s and 1960s are increasingly recognised as significant industrial heritage. Several have been listed. But the list descriptions that anchor these designations in the National Heritage List rarely acknowledge the communities whose labour sustained them through their most economically significant decades — communities whose cultural geography, including mosques converted from terraced houses, community centres, and the urban morphology of Manningham and Little Horton, remains almost entirely absent from the formal heritage record.
The Mechanics of Geospatial Exclusion
Understanding why this exclusion persists requires an appreciation of how heritage datasets are actually constructed. Entries in the National Heritage List and local Historic Environment Records are not generated automatically; they depend upon nomination, assessment, and advocacy. The nomination process historically favoured applicants with access to professional expertise — conservation architects, heritage consultants, academic historians — and an understanding of the designation system's criteria and procedures.
For communities whose relationship with the planning system has historically been adversarial, whose buildings may not conform to the aesthetic categories privileged by listing criteria developed in the 1940s and 1950s, and whose histories have been documented in oral traditions and community archives rather than the architectural monographs and county histories that Historic England's assessors have traditionally relied upon, the barriers to successful nomination are substantial.
The geospatial consequences are compounding. When a building is not listed, it is not protected. When it is not protected, it is vulnerable to demolition, unsympathetic alteration, or change of use. When it is demolished, the physical evidence of the community it housed disappears from the landscape — and from any future dataset compiled from that landscape. The absence in the heritage record thus becomes self-perpetuating: the less that is recorded, the less there is to record.
Local Historic Environment Records, which are meant to capture a broader range of heritage assets than the national list, vary enormously in their comprehensiveness. A 2023 survey by the Historic Environment Forum found that fewer than a third of local authority HERs in England had undertaken any systematic effort to identify and record heritage assets associated with post-war Commonwealth migration. In areas with large British South Asian, Caribbean, or West African communities, this represents an extraordinary gap.
Community Mapping as Counter-Archive
The response from affected communities has been, in several cases, to build the record themselves. The Windrush Generation Heritage Project, operating across Lambeth, Hackney, and Wolverhampton, has developed a community-maintained GIS layer documenting properties of significance to Caribbean heritage in Britain — boarding houses, churches, social clubs, and community organisations — cross-referenced with oral history recordings and photographic archives. This layer is not yet integrated with any official HER, but it exists, it is spatially referenced, and it is growing.
In Birmingham, the Birmingham Black Heritage Initiative has been working with researchers at Birmingham City University to produce a georeferenced inventory of sites associated with the city's South Asian, Caribbean, and West African communities since the 1940s. The project employs participatory mapping methodologies — community members contribute location data and associated histories through a purpose-built mobile application — producing a dataset that is simultaneously a scholarly resource and an act of collective memory.
The Mapping Diversity project, coordinated by the Runnymede Trust with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, has produced georeferenced datasets for several English cities that document the physical footprint of minority ethnic community life across the twentieth century. These datasets have been used to support listing nominations, inform conservation area appraisals, and provide evidence in planning appeals where demolition of community-significant buildings has been proposed.
A Policy Failure with a Spatial Solution
The geospatial bias in Britain's heritage record is not, ultimately, a technical problem. The tools to capture, store, and disseminate spatially referenced heritage data are mature, accessible, and well understood. The problem is one of institutional priority and political will.
Historic England has, in recent years, made explicit commitments to diversifying the heritage it protects and the communities it engages. Its 2022 Heritage and Society report acknowledged the underrepresentation of minority ethnic heritage in the national list and committed to targeted nomination programmes. These commitments are welcome. But they will only produce durable change if they are accompanied by structural reforms to the data infrastructure — if community-generated spatial datasets are formally integrated into local HERs, if list description standards are updated to require documentation of community associations alongside architectural significance, and if the nomination process is genuinely reformed to remove the professional and institutional barriers that have historically excluded minority ethnic communities.
The maps we maintain are a statement of what we value. Britain's heritage geospatial infrastructure currently tells a story of the nation's past that is incomplete to the point of distortion. Correcting that record is not merely a matter of historical justice — it is a prerequisite for a planning system that can genuinely serve all the communities it is meant to protect.
