Heritage, Place and Community

The Rhondda Heritage Park is the only colliery building left in a valley which at one time supported sixty-six deep mines. As the only significant public memorial the Rhondda has to its mining industry, it demonstrates the potential of heritage to offer a thought-provoking and accessible representation of local identity and community. However, critics of heritage point out its pretensions, banalities and failures, and its tainted, entrepreneurial character. In Heritage, Place and Community, Bella Dicks explores these contradictions in the concept and practice of heritage, shows how heritage has come to be adopted as an attempt to regenerate the cultural and economic identity of former industrial areas and discusses the role of heritage in the formation and negotiation of social identity. This ground-breaking book is more than just a study of the development of the Rhondda Heritage Park. Using an innovative theoretical framework, Heritage, Place and Community brings together the economic, cultural, social and political dimensions of heritage production and consumption and seeks to trace the ways in which the study of heritage opens up wider questions of representation and politics.