Sensing Place- Digital Tool

Sensing Place is an innovative community heritage initiative that empowers people from all backgrounds to explore, document, and interpret their personal and collective heritage using accessible digital tools. By enabling participants to engage with the places they live in, the project supports a deeper understanding of how identity, memory, and belonging are shaped—and sometimes contested—through heritage. Led by the University of Winchester and funded through the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), with collaboration from King’s College London, the project foregrounds inclusive, participatory methods that respond to the complexities of heritage in diverse, urban environments.

London—one of the world’s most culturally and historically layered cities—offers a compelling and timely testing ground. Its communities navigate overlapping narratives, dissonant histories, and contested heritage claims. By trialling the project here, Sensing Place engages directly with the challenges of pluralism, memory politics, and place-making in a postcolonial, post-industrial metropolis.

The project aims not only to make heritage more accessible, but also to foster dialogue, reflection, and co-creation around difficult or marginalised histories. In doing so, it contributes to wider debates around equity, digital citizenship, and the role of public history in negotiating contested spaces.