There’s a familiar visual language to heritage – serif typefaces, historic dates, crests, archive photography, deep greens, burgundies and tasteful shades of parchment. You can understand why.
History is important – it gives places credibility, provenance and stories that no newly created attraction could hope to replicate. It also plays into our national identity. History is very ‘British’ – we have enough of it.
However, history alone isn’t a brand strategy.
People might visit because of what happened somewhere 500 years ago but they are experiencing it today. That creates an interesting challenge for museums, castles, historic houses, heritage attractions and cultural organisations. Protect what makes the place important without allowing the past to put limits on its future.
There is a likelihood that the organisation probably hasn’t stood still. New experiences arrive audiences change, events become more ambitious, hospitality grows, education expands, overnight stays appear, membership becomes more important, fundraising needs a louder voice. The organisation develops a clearer purpose beyond simply conserving and presenting ‘old’ things.
The brand can easily get left behind the business.
We encountered exactly that challenge with Hever Castle. For generations it had been closely associated with its most famous former resident, Anne Boleyn. An extraordinary piece of history and an obvious reason to visit. In fact ‘The Childhood Home of Anne Boleyn’ was their tagline.
However, it was no longer the whole reason people visited or the full offer of the business. The estate had become home to award-winning gardens, accommodation, golf, wellbeing, family events and seasonal experiences. Continuing to define the brand primarily through Anne Boleyn made an increasingly diverse destination feel much smaller than it really was.
So the history stayed as an important asset to the Castle, but the perspective had to change.
“An experience to remember” gave the whole estate an idea it could share – tudor history could sit alongside a family day out, gardens alongside accommodation, golf alongside Christmas. Nothing needed to pretend the castle’s past wasn’t important, it simply stopped being asked to do every job.
That’s a useful distinction when thinking about heritage brands. Modernising one doesn’t automatically mean redesigning the logo, finding a brighter colour palette or putting a sans serif typeface on everything.
Start further back. Ask what does this place mean to someone now? What can they experience here that they can’t experience anywhere else? Why does protecting it matter? Why should a child visiting today still care about it in 30 years?
Those questions are more useful than asking how to make heritage look contemporary and they often uncover something much richer.
Heritage organisations have something most brands would love to own – authenticity that cannot be manufactured. The building is real, the objects are real, the stories happened, people stood where your visitors are standing. In a world filling rapidly with generated and AI content, that physical connection carries even more value, but authenticity shouldn’t be confused with nostalgia.
The strongest heritage brands can make the past feel relevant without dressing everything up as the past. Sometimes that means finding a contemporary point of view on a familiar story, sometimes times it means bringing a charitable purpose further forward. Other times it’s recognising that the experience people have today has become bigger than the proposition the organisation has been using for years.
Sometimes the brand itself is perfectly good. It just needs more room to move.
That’s worth remembering before embarking on a wholesale rebrand. Evolution can be more powerful than revolution when people already know and care about you. Keep the equity, understand what still works, find what’s restricting the organisation and build enough flexibility around it to support whatever comes next.
The aim isn’t to make a historic place look less historic, it’s to make sure people understand why its history still matters.
If your attraction has evolved but the story you’re telling about it hasn’t quite kept pace, that’s a conversation we’d love to have.
