Heritage Action Zones (HAZs) are heritage-led regeneration schemes that aim to breathe new life into historic areas. The first 10 Heritage Action Zones were announced in 2017, with a focus on reviving high streets and town centres. There are now over 60 HAZs across England, covering a wide range of different heritage types.
HAZs are a partnership between central government, local authorities and other key third-party organisations and businesses. This approach is key to the success of the scheme, as it ensures that everyone with a stake in the area’s heritage can work together to achieve common goals.
The primary goal of any HAZ is to improve the economic, social, and environmental conditions of an area and they can offer a range of benefits for investors, commercial traders, residents and local tourist attractions alike.
For example, HAZs can help to:
Promote tourist areas: By highlighting the importance of an area’s history, culture and traditions, HAZs can make a town more attractive to potential visitors and encourage people to visit other points of interest such as museums or art galleries. With Place Informatics’ density maps, you can find out where people congregate and where most tourists go. Use this to help plan signage changes or advertising and measure the performance of your interventions.
Create job opportunities: Heritage tourism is a growing sector and HAZs often involve funding for conservation projects, which can create new job and volunteering opportunities in the tourism sector. Many of our clients use Heritage Action Zone data to help with funding applications for new projects with essential insights on your heritage site’s potential catchment area and its impact on footfall within nearby towns and streets.
Protect historic buildings and sites: HAZs help to preserve important historical buildings, landmarks and sites by improving England’s historic environment for present and future generations to enjoy. By monitoring visitor footfall and behaviour, you’ll be able to find out if there is under capacity or overcapacity at certain times of the day / week. This can help you determine the social and environmental impact of tourists at important historic sites.
Increase economic growth & investment: One of the key benefits of HAZs is the investment they can bring into an area. This can be used to financially support a range of initiatives, including building developments, events and marketing campaigns. If you have an upcoming event, it’s now easier than ever to produce your very own PDF report for circulation to key stakeholders containing all important KPIs that will help you achieve success.
Discover Heritage Action Zone Footfall and Visitor Behaviour Data
Evidently, HAZs are an essential component to help shape local communities and understanding how a Heritage Action Zone is impacting on the footfall, dwell time and visit frequency of a tourist area is crucial towards long-term growth and success for many historic towns and cities.
Our HAZ.AI dashboard delivers immediate access to the latest footfall and visitor behaviour insights such as:
- Visitor Demographics – analyse your heritage site visitors socio-economic background (AB, C1, C2, D, E) profiles to see who visits your tourist area.
- Visitor origins – discover where your heritage site visitors come from by identifying postcodes from across the UK to initiate targeted social media marketing.
- High street footfall predictions – measure busiest time of day, average dwell time and heritage site visit frequency to see how footfall is distributed across your tourist area and entire town.
- Visitor flow – identify human movement and foot traffic during the week and weekends, including popular hotspots to help optimise travel routes and parking operations using heatmaps.
- Benchmarking – Compare your heritage site’s performance against others across the UK.
Arrange a demo
Unlock the potential of your Heritage Action Zone by calling 0161 706 1343 or book a webinar of the data available for your area in Calendly here:
