If you’re planning a heritage project, whether that’s restoring a building, running a community archive, recording oral histories, or delivering a skills programme, documentation is usually treated as an afterthought. Something for the final report, a few photos on a phone, maybe a short video if there’s budget left over. It’s worth thinking about earlier than that, and this is a guide to documenting your heritage project properly, along with some pointers for bringing a filmmaker onto a funded project.

Why funders ask for this

Most heritage funders build documentation into what they expect from a project, not as a nice extra but as part of the case for funding it in the first place. The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s own guidance for grants between £10,000 and £250,000 includes a specific “Publicity and promotions” category in the project costs section, and recommends budgeting for it based on real quotes from suppliers rather than guesswork. Their four investment principles for 2023 to 2033 ask applicants to think as hard about how a project will be understood and shared as about how it gets delivered. A short film showing what happened, who was involved, and what changed, does that work far more directly than a written report ever can.

Historic England runs a programme called Everyday Heritage Grants specifically for creative projects connecting people to overlooked or underrepresented heritage, funding up to £25,000 per project, most of them under £10,000. That’s a fund built around documentation and interpretation as the project itself.

What good documentation captures

There’s a real difference between a highlight reel and something that will still make sense in five years, or fifty. For a heritage project in particular, this footage often becomes part of the archive itself, something a future researcher, family member or local historian might return to long after everyone involved has moved on. Proper documentation shows the process: the specialist explaining why a particular technique matters, a difficulty worked through rather than glossed over, the people who did the work talking in their own words about what it meant to them. That material ends up useful when you’re reporting back to funders, for a future funding application, for the organisation’s own archive, and often for local press or social media too, all from the same shoot rather than four separate pieces of work.

Felton Park: a Grade II* glasshouse, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund

I filmed the restoration of the curvilinear glasshouse at Felton Park in Northumberland back in 2016, a rare early nineteenth century structure that had sat on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk Register for several decades. The project brought together an unusually wide range of specialists, an architect, an archaeologist, a structural engineer, metalworkers and a stained glass specialist, alongside the family who had known the building for years before any of that expertise arrived. None of that texture would have survived in a written report alone. The finished film holds all of those voices together, from a discussion of the 8,500 individual pieces of glass fitted during the repair to the family’s own memory of the greenhouse as a source of quiet pride rather than just a working structure. A decade on, that film still explains exactly what was at stake and why the work mattered, which is really the whole point of documenting your heritage project well in the first place.

That kind of permanence shows up in ways you don’t always expect at the time. I was contacted recently by a family member of the blacksmith I filmed at Bowes Railway Museum, who has since passed away. Having that film, showing him at work and hearing his voice again, meant a great deal to them, a reminder that documentation made for a funder or a museum can end up carrying just as much weight for the people closest to the person in it. The Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland is another heritage project made with that longer view in mind, built to be understood well beyond the opening it originally marked.

The same is true of skills-based projects. On another Heritage Lottery Fund scheme I filmed, the trainees’ own figures were genuinely striking, over 60 per cent had been unemployed when they joined, and more than 90 per cent had found work in engineering or the heritage sector by the time it finished. Figures like that matter to a funder, but they don’t tell you what it actually felt like to be there. The film did that instead, through trainees describing what the placement gave them beyond a qualification.

Sometimes it isn’t a whole scheme but one person carrying on a craft that deserves the same attention. I filmed Jon McGuinness, one of a handful of practising millwrights left in the country, restoring the machinery of a working corn mill at Warwick Bridge in Cumbria. The film isn’t really about the mechanics of millwrighting, most viewers wouldn’t follow the detail of it anyway, it’s about someone who has spent a lifetime mastering something most people have never even heard of, and who still clearly loves doing it. That, more than the craft itself, is usually the story worth telling.

Building a filmmaker into your funding application

A few practical steps, if this is new territory:

Budget for it properly, and early. Most funders let you cost documentation as part of the project rather than treating it as a separate ask, but you need to build it into the original application, not add it on once the money has arrived. A day’s filming with a professional filmmaker, plus editing time, is a modest line in most project budgets compared with what it produces.

Bring the filmmaker in before the work starts, not at the end. The most useful footage usually comes from watching the work happen, rather than staging the finished result for the camera afterwards.

Think about who needs to talk on camera. Specialists explaining their own work in their own words are usually more compelling than a voiceover explaining it for them, so it helps to identify those people early, giving enough time to put them at ease before filming starts.

Be clear about what you need the finished film to do. A three minute film for social media and a ten minute film for a funder’s final report are different briefs, so say so upfront rather than leaving a filmmaker to guess.

Some of this kind of work takes years rather than days. I’m currently in production on a documentary about the elite boarding schools of the Third Reich, a project four years in the making so far and built almost entirely around testimony, people telling their own story, or someone else’s, on camera. Documentation like this isn’t always a single day’s filming attached to the end of a project. Sometimes it is the project, and that longer view is something I bring to heritage work of any scale.

Other funding sources to know about

Beyond the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England’s Everyday Heritage Grants, a few others fit different kinds of projects. The Heritage Revival Fund, delivered by the Architectural Heritage Fund with DCMS and Historic England, opened in May 2026 and runs until March 2030, though it’s aimed at charities and social enterprises taking ownership of and adapting historic buildings, so it fits capital building projects more naturally than standalone documentation work. The Community Archives and Heritage Group keeps a well maintained directory of smaller and more specialist funders too, including the National Archives’ own grants, Sporting Heritage’s community grants, and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which funds a wider range of arts and social justice work from £30,000 up to £300,000. It’s kept current and covers regional and smaller funders that a general search won’t always surface.

A final thought

None of this needs to be complicated. The point is simply that documentation is part of the project, not something left over once the real work is finished, and funders increasingly expect to see it treated that way. If you’re only at the idea stage of a heritage project, nothing written down yet, no funding secured, I’m happy to talk it through, help think about what a funder might want to see, or simply give an honest view on what a film could realistically capture given your budget and timescale. Get in touch whenever feels right, even if that’s well before anything is confirmed.