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.

ISBN 0708316689   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9780708316689 (What's this?)   Pages 272 Publisher University of Wales Press   Published in Wales Imprint University of Wales Press   Series title Cymru-Contemporary German Writers Format Paperback   Height (mm) 216 Publication date 15 Dec 2000   Width (mm) 138 DEWEY 306.409429   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

		List of figures, tables and illustrations
		Acknowledgements
		Introduction		1
Pt. I		Contexts of Heritage
1		Tourism and heritage in the Valleys: the local context		9
2		New vernacular heritage: wider cultural and economic contexts		33
3		Heritage debates		59
Pt. II		Imagined Communities
4		Wales in a glass case		78
5		The Black Gold community		103
Pt. III		Heritage, Governance and Ownership
6		From mine to museum: the evolution of heritage in the Rhondda		125
7		Heritage and local memory		148
8		The technologies of heritage encoding		170
Pt. IV		Visiting the Past
9		The rhetoric of heritage: placing the visitor		195
10		Visiting the Rhondda		219
		Conclusion: Heritage, place and community in the Rhondda		241
App. 1		Black Gold audio-visual shows		249
App. 2		The Rhondda Heritage Park case study: empirical research base		265
		Notes		269
		References		279
		Index		294

' ... I expect that it will become required reading for final year and postgraduate heritage management (and tourism) students, as well as the tourism research community. Thoughtful practitioners will also find much here to stimulate reflection ... The text is scholarly, written carefully and well organised throughout. Its apparent simplicity of structure and coherence belies the careful planning and meticulous research that much have informed its development.' (Tourism Management) '...this book makes interesting reading and...is very competitively priced.' New Heritage

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