Port Eliot Festival: a crucible of creativity
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Professional discourses within the UK heritage industry have traditionally emphasised its built, tangible assets. Of these, historic houses have often been viewed as symbols of greatness, linked to immutable value and in need of saving from ruination – an embedded elitist perception of British heritage. Over the past decade, public debates on social justice have coalesced in foregrounding a commitment to inclusion and diversity in the heritage sector, to decolonisation in museums, and to a shift in cultural policy that calls attention to the way heritage is used and celebrated in informal processes and practices. In a response to this ‘cultural turn’ and diversity agenda, the UK Government ratified the UNESCO 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to officially recognise the country’s everyday or living heritage (UK Government 2024). Within this ratification process, during public consultation between December 2023 and February 2024, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) reiterated UNESCO’s guidance on what is intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as ‘[t] raditional, contemporary and living at the same time: ICH does not only represent inherited traditions from the past but also contemporary rural and urban practices in which diverse groups take part’ (UNESCO 2025). The term ‘contemporary’ reflects how heritage is increasingly understood as having a relationship with the past, but one that is present-centred (Harrison 2013) and embracing the dynamic, evolving and diverse forms of ICH within the United Kingdom. This paper explores a case study of Port Eliot Festival, an annual contemporary event that took place in the grounds of a historic house in Cornwall, United Kingdom, The paper examines the festival’s intermingling of tangible and intangible heritage, how it created a gateway for the expression and performance of ICH, and the role of creative practitioners in creating room for experimentation within this cultural space. Further, the study reflects UNESCO’s 2003 Convention recognising the ‘deep seated interdependence between the ICH and the tangible, cultural and natural heritage’ UNESCO (2024.3). Festivals are therefore explored as a form of heritage that provides a social, loose, unpredictable, dynamic cultural space, in contrast to a fixed heritage site. This temporality challenges the assumption that the value of ‘heritage’ is immutable and fixed; what is important emerges through a personal, sensorial and embodied experience. The paper argues that the looseness of this cultural space is the ‘heritage value’, and as festivals are increasingly recognised officially in cultural policy as a strategic ‘good’ (a wellbeing/economic resource for local and regional growth/social cohesiveness), we need to be critical of why they are mobilised, who is involved in the decision-making and who benefits from them. Festivals (whether ancient, revived or contemporary) are more than an end product; they are a socio-cultural process of active valuing, with social interaction between people being a core aspect of this act of heritage-making.
Abstract
Professional discourses within the UK heritage industry have traditionally emphasised its built, tangible assets. Of these, historic houses have often been viewed as symbols of greatness, linked to immutable value and in need of saving from ruination – an embedded elitist perception of British heritage. Over the past decade, public debates on social justice have coalesced in foregrounding a commitment to inclusion and diversity in the heritage sector, to decolonisation in museums, and to a shift in cultural policy that calls attention to the way heritage is used and celebrated in informal processes and practices. In a response to this ‘cultural turn’ and diversity agenda, the UK Government ratified the UNESCO 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to officially recognise the country’s everyday or living heritage (UK Government 2024). Within this ratification process, during public consultation between December 2023 and February 2024, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) reiterated UNESCO’s guidance on what is intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as ‘[t] raditional, contemporary and living at the same time: ICH does not only represent inherited traditions from the past but also contemporary rural and urban practices in which diverse groups take part’ (UNESCO 2025). The term ‘contemporary’ reflects how heritage is increasingly understood as having a relationship with the past, but one that is present-centred (Harrison 2013) and embracing the dynamic, evolving and diverse forms of ICH within the United Kingdom. This paper explores a case study of Port Eliot Festival, an annual contemporary event that took place in the grounds of a historic house in Cornwall, United Kingdom, The paper examines the festival’s intermingling of tangible and intangible heritage, how it created a gateway for the expression and performance of ICH, and the role of creative practitioners in creating room for experimentation within this cultural space. Further, the study reflects UNESCO’s 2003 Convention recognising the ‘deep seated interdependence between the ICH and the tangible, cultural and natural heritage’ UNESCO (2024.3). Festivals are therefore explored as a form of heritage that provides a social, loose, unpredictable, dynamic cultural space, in contrast to a fixed heritage site. This temporality challenges the assumption that the value of ‘heritage’ is immutable and fixed; what is important emerges through a personal, sensorial and embodied experience. The paper argues that the looseness of this cultural space is the ‘heritage value’, and as festivals are increasingly recognised officially in cultural policy as a strategic ‘good’ (a wellbeing/economic resource for local and regional growth/social cohesiveness), we need to be critical of why they are mobilised, who is involved in the decision-making and who benefits from them. Festivals (whether ancient, revived or contemporary) are more than an end product; they are a socio-cultural process of active valuing, with social interaction between people being a core aspect of this act of heritage-making.