The Creative Conundrum: a site-specific approach to the policy and practice of heritage and change on the Jurassic Coast

Abstract

Since being designated in 2001 as a natural World Heritage Site the Jurassic Coast managers have worked for it to be recognised as the Creative Coast. This thesis explores and challenges the entanglements of policy and practice in the process of the site becoming creative. Through archival research, interviewing and ethnographic methodologies this project has sought to develop a site-specific approach to creative arts policy. Research has integrated investigation of the embodied and quotidian geographies of decision-making with policy discourse analysis. Following formal and informal, public and private artistic practices, this research has traced how the Jurassic Coast is constructed by the creative activities of those who inhabit it.

In this research, relationships between the arts, creativity and geological heritage become complicated due to a paradox inherent within the site’s policy. The geological heritage preserved through the Jurassic Coast’s designation is acknowledged to be under continual processes of change. In response, this research illustrates how creativity can be used as a tool to illuminate tensions between the need to preserve natural processes of erosion and retreat and the desire to provide access and promote engagement with the site.

Furthermore, it is argued that using a site-specific and critical approach to everyday creativity allows geographers to understand how people engage with place in a multitude of ways. This is especially significant as the heritage value of this site lies in the ways in which different communities engage with it. It is through these day-to-day creative encounters that the Jurassic Coast is culturally constructed.