Lincolnshire Heritage Open Days is back in 2020 with a very special festival.
For the 2020 festival, events will take place over a ten-day period, from Friday 11th to Sunday 20th September. The theme will be The Past and Pastimes - The Heritage of Lincolnshire's Leisure as we celebrate the county's heritage of and through free time and hobbies. From tours and talks on sporting clubs to re-enactments and model railways, visitors will be amazed to see how Lincolnshire leisure developed and grew through the ages.
This page also contains helpful downloads for organisers to use throughout the planning period, right up to the big event.
Please note that registration for inclusion in this years' brochure has now closed. You can still register your event for inclusion on our webpages and on the national site until 30th July 2020.
COVID-19 Queries
National Festival Changes for 2020:
- Guidance will be issued to ensure that events are safe for everyone involved. This means that some sites will need to introduce special measures to ensure social distancing, and some may not be able to welcome visitors in the traditional sense.
- Because some sites may not be able to open to the public, the national team are welcoming digital events for the first time ever. Essentially, they will market and publicise any event which takes place during the festival and gives the public an insight into the heritage. This can involve video or photographic tours, live Q & A sessions with staff, Zoom Talks etc.
We have been promised more guidance, including safe social distancing advice, from the national team as soon as it is available. We can probably assume though that sites may have to follow the government guidance, which includes limiting the number of people within an enclosed space, setting up one way systems, or, if an outside event, limiting the group and keeping 2ms apart.
Changes to the Lincolnshire Festival for 2020
- Obviously the above will affect most, if not all, of our events. Our aim will be to support you as much as possible. As such we will be hosting webinars and online training for those who want to learn or grow your confidence in using digital resources such as Social Media, Zoom and Youtube to showcase your sites. We ask that you get in contact asap if they need assistance or training on using digital resources to host an event, as we are looking to host these in July.
- We envision the digital brochure launch taking place around Friday 31st July 2020, and hope to have the paper copy ready for around Monday 3rd August 2020. The brochure will be available as an interactive PDF on the website, which can also be downloaded to computers and smartphones. These dates may be subject to change though as we realise that the timescales are very, very tight, but we will do our best and will confirm dates once we’ve received everyone’s confirmations. We will also be listing events on our bespoke Lincolnshire HODs social media pages.
- We will not be doing the full print run of the brochure for two reasons. Many of the places who traditionally stocked them (e.g. TICs and Libraries) are likely to be closed for the foreseeable future, so we will struggle to get it out there. We also want to get the brochure out there asap to get as much exposure as possible. If we did the normal print run, the brochure would not be available until the week before the festival, at the very earliest.
- We will, however, do a limited-edition print run of just a few thousand which can be ordered directly from us with a small fee to cover the postage. We will begin pre-orders for these booklets on Monday 1st July 2020 to help us judge how many we need to print.
The chair of the Lincolnshire Heritage Open Days Steering Group has provided the following links and info which might be useful to you:
- Visit Lincoln: https://www.visitlincoln.com/blog/Summary-of-the-Visit-England-COVID-Secure-Industry-Standard.
They are really keen to support tourism sites to reopen again safely. Anyone with any questions is welcome to contact them for more information and support, and it's not just aimed at businesses. The person to talk to there is Samantha Pover – Samantha@visitlincoln.com
- Visit Britain are presenting a free 1-2-1 digital support platform called Digital Boost: The Covid-19 crisis has presented many challenges for small businesses, particularly in building digital capability. The platform will host a community of digital experts who will offer one-to-one digital support to small businesses, free of charge. https://www.digitalboost.org.uk/?utm_source=DCMS&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=vb_only_enews_10_06_2020&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=vb_only_10_06_2020
- Story Maps : I.e. Digital ‘walking’ tours. The Historic Places team at Lincolnshire County Council were going to do a Boston historic pub guided tour, but they have found some online software, and are looking at creating a story map instead so that the tour can be self-guided and/or online. You can upload old photos and present them over Streetview, so you can take people back in time: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/88bd5855dc3847769f2c6847b15af64e / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl-J9GjieYM
