Peterborough has a rich heritage covering the built and natural environments, including 12 sites which make up the Heritage Attractions Group (also known as Peterborough Attractions).
Amongst its members are the Cathedral, Peterborough Museum, Prebendal Manor, Thorney Heritage Museum and Nene Valley Railway, John Clare Cottage and Railworld. The group covers the entire Unitary Authority area, both Soke and new town.
Having these attractions on our doorstep is of immense social and cultural value to the city; it gives us something to be proud of, leisure facilities to visit and educational resources. These intangible but vital values are difficult to show on a balance sheet, but the value to the local economy of just these members alone is worth examining in further detail.
The Association of Independent Museums has a formula for working out the value of heritage sites to the local area. In order to work this out for Peterborough I got the most recent accurate visitor figures for Peterborough Attractions, which happened to be the figures for 2010 visits. This came out at a brilliantly high total of nearly a million individual visitors to members of the Attractions Group. Of these attractions three of the historic properties are designated as ‘large’ attractions with over 50,000 individual visitors a year – in no order – the Cathedral, Peterborough Museum and Burghley House.
In order not skew the figures either way, I took the most conservative estimate possible, using recent visitor data to the city centre and Cathedral, to estimate the number of visitors who stay overnight and those who are either local or only come into Peterborough for day trips. This assumes 40% of visitors are day trippers from other areas and 60% are local, and assumes for the moment that none are staying for longer, although from experience I know the Heritage Attractions Members do get visitors from afar as well as from overseas visitors and those who come from far and wide!
However the exact figure for this is difficult to establish without further research (and so the true figure is undoubtedly higher!) Using these figures the total value of the Heritage Attractions Group members to the Peterborough economy was just over £27 million in 2010 alone! It should be noted that this is a conservative estimate, with the real impact likely to be considerably higher, but shows how valuable these sites are to the city.
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