National Lottery Heritage Fund: Heritage 2033 - Strategic Initiative; Nature Cities and Towns

Overview

As part of its Heritage 2033 strategy, the National Lottery Heritage Fund has launched three strategic initiatives offering targeted funding to address long-standing heritage issues across the UK.

These initiatives are:

• The Heritage Places initiative - will support projects that improve or transform nine identified heritage locations through collaborative projects with local partners and organisations.
• The Landscape Connections initiative - will invest in around 20 long-term projects to boost nature recovery and connect more people to Protected Landscapes and other world-class landscapes.
• The Nature Cities and Towns initiative - will support cities and towns, in partnership with others, to deliver urban nature recovery through thriving historic parks and green spaces.

Nature Cities and Towns

Important

This guidance is for applicants who have successfully passed the Expression of Interest (EOI) stage and have been invited to apply to Nature Towns and Cities for grants between £250,000 and £1million.

Nature Towns and Cities aims to support local authorities, their partners and communities with capacity and resources to put public green and blue spaces at the heart of their thinking. Visit the Nature Towns and Cities website to find out more about their plans and wider ambitions.

By 2028 they want to have supported places across the UK with grant investment, together with expertise and resources from their partners, to:

• place access to nature and nature recovery at the heart of local placemaking so that its benefits can be realised for health, prosperity, nature, heritage and local pride
• co-create with communities and partners ambitious green space strategies and improvement plans
• create strong and diverse partnerships between the local communities, businesses and local authorities that focus on the role of urban green and blue space in delivering better outcomes for health, wellbeing, heritage, transport, planning and nature
• Develop implementation plans that will transform the way public green spaces are utilised, managed and funded for the benefit of people and nature. This should include developing costed project plans and exploring how to unlock new investment from a wide range of investors and funders beyond just the National Lottery.

Considerations for a Nature Towns and Cities application

There will be one round of funding with grants available from £250,000 up to £1m. Your project can last for up to three years and will require a single application following completion of a successful Expression of Interest (EOI).

• There will be one round of funding with grants available from £250,000 up to £1m.  Your project can last for up to three years and will require a full application to be submitted.  
• The deadline to apply is 12noon on 14 April 2025.
• Funding decisions will be made in early July 2025 and we will aim to contact applicants by 11 July 2025.

In addition to the standard requirements of our National Lottery Heritage Grants programme, including responding to all four investment principles, your project application should:

• Focus on all the public urban green and blue spaces across an entire place. It is for you to determine the boundary of the place – it might be a local or combined authority administrative area, a town, a city, a city region or several towns or boroughs working together.
• Set out how you will lead for ambitious change that will deliver against our desired outcomes and ensure green space provides more for people and places.
• Show how a cross-disciplinary team and partnership working will ensure breadth in your thinking and active working across heritage, planning, transport, health, community and nature sectors.
• Identify what resources or support you will need. This might include for example investing in additional expertise and capacity to: engage local communities, develop new strategic partnerships, establish new bodies such as a foundation or trust, design new financial models, incentivise and unlock new investment, develop a project pipeline and replicate learning from the Future Parks Accelerator initiative.
• Allocate resources and capacity to join regular online network events and cohort learning sessions, to contribute to cohort working and to attend in-person visits to learn from other projects. We anticipate network and cohort events will involve between six and 10 events each year and be a mix of in-person and virtual.

All funded projects will receive free expert support from partners on topics such as green infrastructure planning, community engagement and green finance.

This initiative will not fund capital works. If you wish to apply for funds to regenerate a historic park or improve an existing site for nature, please apply through their National Lottery Heritage Grants programme.

Who can apply

Applications are open to not-for-profit organisations, and partnerships led by not-for-profit organisations, from across the UK.

They encourage you to work with other people to develop and carry out your project.

If you plan to work with any other organisations to carry out a significant proportion of your project, you must formalise your relationship with a partnership agreement.

If you are making a joint application, you will need to decide which organisation will be the lead applicant. The lead applicant will complete the application, and if successful, receive the grant and provide project updates.

They usually expect the owner of the heritage (the public green space) to be the lead applicant. If the lead applicant is not the owner of the heritage, they usually ask them to sign up to the terms of grant.

If private owners or for-profit organisations are involved in the project, they expect public benefit to be demonstrably greater than private gain. They are unlikely to fund more than one project from a single place.