There’s a quiet myth that history belongs to everyone.
We talk about it as a shared inheritance — something we all hold in common, regardless of background or postcode. In theory, the past is everyone’s to explore. In practice, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Who actually gets to learn the past — to visit museums, to study history, to feel entitled to curiosity — depends on things we don’t always acknowledge: class, geography, money, and time. The result is a subtle but profound inequality. Some of us grow up surrounded by the past — in books, in museums, in dinner table conversations — while others encounter it only in slogans or the odd school worksheet.
I’ve spent most of my adult life thinking about this question. I study history at university, and I volunteer with a local children’s group that runs free archaeology sessions — weekend digs and hands-on activities for kids who might never otherwise get the chance. It’s joyful, messy, and full of curiosity. But every time we run a session, I’m reminded how much effort access takes. Parents have to find the petrol money, pack lunches, give up their Saturday mornings, and trust that the experience will be worth it.
Even “free” history costs something.
And that’s the quiet truth of the past in the UK: it’s free in theory, but not in practice. Access to it depends on who can afford curiosity.
When the Museums Close
My local museum closed a few years ago. The official reason was low visitor numbers — “insufficient engagement,” but, of course, people didn’t stop caring about the past. They just didn’t have the time, transport, or disposable energy to visit. When the museum shut, a small piece of the town’s memory went with it. The artefacts went into storage, the signage faded, and an entire space that once said this place matters was gone.
For a lot of working-class and post-industrial towns across Wales and northern England, that story is depressingly familiar. Local museums close, community archives lose funding, and school budgets cut out trips that used to spark a lifelong love of history. Once gone, these spaces rarely come back.
And it’s not just about buildings. It’s about what happens to the relationship between people and their own past. When history is only ever something you see on TV or in someone else’s city, it stops feeling like it belongs to you. “Heritage” becomes an abstract word — something to do with tourism or national pride, not lived experience.
When I visit Amgueddfa Cymru in Cardiff, I always feel a mix of admiration and sadness. It’s a brilliant institution — free, bilingual, inclusive — but it also reminds me how centralised our access to the past has become. For many children, especially in rural or working-class communities, visiting a national museum is a once-in-a-childhood event. The rest of the time, the past arrives in bits and pieces — whatever the curriculum, budget, or weather allows.
The Price of Curiosity
The phrase “the past costs money” sounds dramatic, but it’s true. Even free museums and public archives require hidden resources: time off work, transport, childcare, energy.
In 2025, The Guardian reported that schools across the UK are cancelling museum visits because they simply can’t afford them anymore. Coach hire, staff cover, insurance — all of it adds up. And when budgets tighten, cultural trips are the first to go. For rural schools in Wales, the costs are even higher; one museum trip might mean a full day on the road.
Free entry doesn’t erase class barriers either. The Museum Association’s research shows that working-class families visit museums at far lower rates than middle-class ones — not because they’re uninterested, but because the experience itself can feel alien. There’s an unspoken etiquette to cultural spaces, a subtle sense of who belongs and who doesn’t. For someone who’s never grown up in those settings, walking into a marble-floored gallery can feel like crossing a line.
As one museum worker put it, “You can remove the ticket price, but not the feeling of exclusion.”
And then there’s the question of representation. Who’s in the displays? Who’s telling the stories?
Museums across the UK have done important work on race and gender diversity in recent years, but class remains the elephant in the gallery. Working-class lives appear mainly as hardship exhibits — soot, poverty, tragedy — not as creativity, solidarity, or pride. The people who lived those histories rarely get to curate them.
Time, Energy, and the Cost of Thinking
Access isn’t just about money. It’s also about time — something that’s unequally distributed but rarely discussed.
Leisure time is a privilege. To sit and read, to visit a heritage site, to wander through an archive — all require hours not spent working or caring. For many families, curiosity has to fit between shifts or around childcare. It’s not that people don’t want to learn history. It’s that curiosity has to compete with exhaustion.
Even volunteering, something I value deeply, relies on having a little spare time and stability. I’m lucky — as a university student, I can carve out a Saturday for community archaeology. But for parents who come along, that Saturday is a sacrifice. They drive, pack lunches, keep an eye on the kids, all for a few hours of free learning.
That’s what inequality looks like at ground level: even access that’s free still costs the most to those with the least.
And in higher education, the same logic applies. The humanities are being squeezed. Departments close, courses vanish, and students are quietly warned that history is “impractical.” The Royal Historical Society recently warned that some regions now have no local university offering history at all.
That’s not just a curriculum issue — it’s a cultural one. When the ability to study history disappears from a region, so does the sense that the past matters there. We’re left with pockets of cultural silence, where curiosity is a private luxury rather than a public right.
Heritage, Feminism, and Whose Stories Survive
When I tell people I study history, they often smile and ask, “What period?”
Sometimes I joke that my period is access itself. Who gets to learn the past, and who doesn’t? Who gets remembered, and who gets forgotten?
As a feminist and as a Welsh student, I see the question of access as political. Feminist history taught us that the personal is historical — that everyday lives matter. But those lives are often missing from the record. Working-class women, mothers, carers, domestic workers, community organisers — the people who held society together are the ones most often left out of “official” history.
And it’s not because their stories don’t exist. It’s because the systems that preserve memory — archives, museums, publishing — are shaped by the same inequalities as everything else. If you don’t have the time to write your memoirs, or the money to donate your papers, your story gets lost.
That’s why community projects matter so much. In Wales, the People’s Collection Wales has become a small revolution in public memory. Anyone can upload photos, recordings, and documents — turning history into a collective act rather than a gated archive. In doing so, it challenges the idea that the past belongs to experts. It says: you were there, so your version counts too.
That, to me, is a feminist principle. Knowledge should circulate horizontally, not hierarchically. And history, of all subjects, should model that equality.
The Shrinking Space for the Humanities
The irony is that just as we’re starting to talk about widening access, the actual institutions teaching history are contracting. Across the UK, humanities departments are closing or merging, especially in post-industrial regions. The official explanation is financial: low enrolments, funding cuts, the marketisation of education. But the underlying logic is ideological. We’ve absorbed the idea that the value of a subject lies in its earning potential.
That logic would have baffled earlier generations of reformers. The miners’ libraries of South Wales weren’t founded to make anyone rich; they existed because workers wanted to understand the world. Education was liberation, not investment.
Now, when students from working-class or rural backgrounds look at tuition fees and cost-of-living pressures, they hear an implicit warning: don’t waste your money on something that won’t “pay off.” History, literature, philosophy — all the disciplines that teach critical thinking and empathy — are recast as indulgences.
But the humanities don’t just interpret the past; they humanise it. They remind us that progress, justice, and identity are never purely technical. They’re stories — and if we stop telling them, someone else will tell them for us.
Reimagining Access
So how do we change it?
First, we have to stop pretending that access is just about opening the door. It’s about what waits inside. If museums, archives, and universities want to be truly inclusive, they need to meet people where they are — in community centres, online platforms, libraries, and local partnerships.
Funding matters too. Local councils shouldn’t have to choose between keeping the lights on and keeping a museum open. If the UK can invest in cultural prestige projects, it can fund everyday heritage in the towns that built the country.
Second, we need to value different kinds of expertise. A historian in a university and a retired miner recording oral histories are part of the same ecosystem of memory. The question shouldn’t be who is “qualified” but who is included.
And finally, we need to make curiosity affordable again. That means affordable public transport, paid internships, flexible volunteering, and libraries open after working hours. It means recognising that time is a resource, not an assumption.
Why the Past Still Matters
Sometimes people ask me, gently, if history is really “useful.”
I know what they mean — will it get me a job, will it solve climate change, will it pay off a student loan?
But history is useful in the same way that empathy is useful. It teaches you how to see context, contradiction, cause, and consequence. It teaches you that the world didn’t begin with you — and that it won’t end with you either.
When societies forget history, they don’t become free; they become gullible. Nostalgia and misinformation fill the silence. Simplified stories — “the good old days,” “we used to be great” — replace complicated truths. Without historical literacy, democracy itself becomes fragile.
That’s why access to history isn’t a cultural perk; it’s a civic right.
The right to know how we got here. The right to question inherited narratives. The right to see yourself — and your community — reflected in the story.
Who Gets to Belong
When I think about “who gets to learn the past,” I think about those Saturday mornings at the children’s archaeology group. The kids are brilliant — muddy, curious, full of questions about who lived here “before.” Watching them discover fragments of pottery or a Roman coin feels like watching history open itself up again.
But I also think about their parents. Some are tired from work. Some quietly mention that petrol’s expensive this week. Some can’t always come. Every smiling photo of a child with a trowel hides that invisible cost — time, fuel, energy.
Those families are doing something heroic, even if it looks ordinary: they’re insisting that their children deserve access to curiosity. They’re saying the past belongs to them too.
And that, ultimately, is what this is all about.
History isn’t just a subject. It’s a mirror of who we believe is worth remembering — and who we believe is worth teaching.
The Past as a Public Right
So maybe the real question isn’t who gets to learn the past, but who we allow to stop learning it.
If we truly believe history belongs to everyone, then we have to treat it like a public service. That means funding it, teaching it, protecting it from austerity. It means making space for people who were never meant to be part of the conversation. It means understanding that the past isn’t finished — it’s a living conversation we’re all entitled to join.
In Welsh, the word cynefin means something like “place of belonging.” It’s the idea that we are shaped by where we come from, by the histories that surround us even when we don’t notice them.
To me, widening access to history is about giving everyone back their cynefin — their right to belong in the story of where they live.
Because if the past doesn’t belong to everyone, the future won’t either.
Paper and Glory 
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