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The Heritage TakeoverHeritage as a major business has only taken off over the lasts 50 years. Many people wellbelow retiring age can remember visiting Stonehenge when you could just stop your car andwalk around it, before fences and entry charges were introduced.

Many photographers will remember when you could just walk around any property owned

by or for the public and take photos, no fences, photo rights, or monopolies set up to

benefit some picture library owned or run by some organisation or governmentorganisation.So do you recall when we gave these various groups of people permission to share out our

heritage and restrict both our access to it and our rights as photographers to photographwhat belongs to us all.With it broke up into a number of brands, could it be that some of these brands will be sold

off or given away to commercial organisations, could we see eventually some gasoline

billionaire from Russia taking over English Heritage or certain rights being sold offwholesale.

If you can't imagine this, just think about those who put their money into an Englishbuilding society, owned by its members, run for the benefit of its members, now who ownseach of them, and are they all now controlled from this country. Not any more.The picture library monopolies run by the major heritage brands like The National Trust and

English Heritage, have done deals with a commercial company to sell prints and the use of

images. We as a photographer are restricted from selling our images of properties we allown and are managed by English Heritage and the National Trust. You can't put your

images on their picture libraries either. However if you have a website you can sell theimages for the commercial firm that sells these images and get a commission. So its not

that they have an objection to others making a profit from these photos, its just they wantto maintain a commercial monopoly, which I don't see as defendable.So how have we got to this point:-While 30 years or so ago the numbers who were travelling and enjoying the heritage siteswere low, today it has become very popular, big business with a growing number of brands.

The National Trust membership for example has grown from 160,000 in the late 1960's to

3.5 million today. English Heritage, the other major brand and membership organisationwas only set up in 1983, and since that other 'charities' like 'Historic Royal Palaces',

'Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Society', 'Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust ' and

many others have been established to allow you to visit and pay for the privilege to see

properties we all own.Working out who actually runs and owns what is difficult, basically most of the assets weregiven or acquired by the nation and conceptually belong to us all. Most are controlled by

organisations that came about or have special powers by Acts of Parliament, and directly or

indirectly controlled and or funded via the government, although sometimes it may bedivvied out via several steps through linked organisations. Many work very closely together,it must be really convenient that English Heritage and the National Trust have built theirmain offices in the same road.

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Removing the fog, defining who runs and where the funding flows is quite a task however.

To fund heritage attractions there are many funding sources besides membership and entry

fees, a listing of many of them can be found onHeritage Link, exactly how many andhow independent is difficult to see, for example the Heritage Lottery Fund distributes largesums coming from the National Lottery and is run by theNational Heritage Memorial Fund,

who inherited government heritage funds and are funded completely by the

government. Its powers and function was extended by the National Heritage Act 1997, anunusually short Act of Parliament and then along came the National Heritage Act 1980 that

sets it up. A load of organisations were set up under theNational Heritage Act 1983,amongst these was the 'Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England',

section 35 allows this to form companies and more. This is still the official name of what weknow as 'English Heritage' it is funded in part by the Government and in part from revenue

earned from our historic properties and other services. Their website says that in

2005/06 public funding was worth 129 million, and income from other sources was 41.9

million. It reports to Parliament through the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport,as does the National Heritage Memorial Fund. ............So as these government influenced, if not technically controlled, organisations set upmonopolies and divide up our heritage between themselves, we as photographers find that

some would like to restrict greatly what we take. They think its their property, their rights,their option to do deals with other groups or in some cases commercial organisations and

set the rules so as to be commercially convenient and beneficial to themselves, establishingmonopolies.

This flies completely against the trend in other areas of law, business and government, with

ramblers being given greater rights to cross land, with monopolies not being allowedbetween commercial operations. Some of what has been done is probably illegal, especiallywhere commercial monopolies are developed.

Morally we also need to ask why we should have restrictions put on us to photographproperties that we all own, and belongs to the nation, this includes all properties held for us

by the National Trust, English Heritage and the many other agencies, charities and brands

governments have established. Those running these organisations should also rememberthat they are working for us, and while they need to have entry fees and some other means

to cover costs maybe, we the public are likely at some time to look at who is running thisand who is receiving what benefit. Like MP's its likely that some will get a surprise when the

public get to see what is happening with the fog removed.Maybe we should let them know we are watching them.Maybe we have not asked enough questions or looked in enough detail so far..........

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