Cultural Heritage Management (Taught)

Cultural Heritage is all around us. It is at the centre of current political debates around identity, how we feel about our past, and who we as a country want to be on the international stage. To be part of shaping the UK’s cultural heritage landscape is a rewarding and challenging career, requiring a wide and varied range of skills and knowledge.

The MSc in Cultural Heritage Management is designed to give learners a broad and thorough grounding in the varied and fast-moving cultural heritage sector. It will equip learners with the wider contextual and practical skills to allow them to engage analytically with a variety of real-life heritage issues. As the course progresses, learners will be able to follow their developing interests and tailor the direction of their assessed learning to pursue a variety of professional heritage careers. This MSc provides a more flexible pathway into cultural heritage, ideal for learners who have a particular specialism or area of interest they would like to build upon, or those who wish to gain a broad range of experiences across the sector.

The RAU has been at the forefront of land-based education for 180 years, and to study cultural heritage here is a natural choice. The programme is taught in the historic Cultural Heritage Institute, the RAU’s Swindon campus set in the ‘heritage capital of England’, home to the National Trust, English Heritage and Historic England. It provides unparalleled opportunities to work with key heritage agencies and to gain management insights.

This programme will help learners develop an in-depth and applied understanding of cultural heritage enabling graduates to pursue a wide range of careers in the cultural heritage sector.

Optional modules will allow you to tailor your MSc to a specialist area (for example, standing buildings consultancy or archaeology) within the wider sector.

Career prospects include:

Local authority Conservation Officer
Heritage agency roles (National Trust, English Heritage, etc.)
Historic building manager
Advisory on the interpretation and display of historic buildings
Heritage Consultant
Regeneration roles
Fundraising bodies
Wider cultural sector, museums, galleries, charities, etc.
Conservation planning and management
The course also provides an excellent grounding for further academic study, for example at PhD level.