Mount Stewart stately house lies ten miles from Northern Ireland’s capital city Belfast. The estate has been home to the Londonderry family since the 18th Century. Today the property is owned by the National Trust. The histories and heritage of the estate are the focus of the ‘BeHere’ research project, led by our one of our new Community Innovation Practitioners, Lisa Rea Currie (Queens University Belfast). Her new research explores how creativity can help build stronger connections between communities in Northern Ireland and its heritage sites to enable and promote inclusion and belonging.
The Mount Stewart estate contains historical markers that frame key moments in Northern Irish history, from the Great Famine of the 1800s, to the sectarian Troubles of the 1970s and the long-term impact of English colonial rule. The BeHere project asks fundamental questions about heritage, its ownership and narratives, such as who is included and excluded from heritage spaces? How does Mount Stewart highlight issues of belonging and inequality through the centuries? What considerations are at the forefront when it comes to accessibility to the property?
Significantly, Lisa is co-leading the research with the National Trust as R&D partners. In doing so, her R&D is helping to develop the capacity and capability of the National Trust as an independent research organisation. Together, their joint research will be co-delivered with a range of community organisations, including Arts Ekta, The Link family and community centre in Newtownards and Kilcooley Women’s Centre in nearby Bangor.
In October 2025, the AHRC Creative Communities team visited the project to learn more about the place and people being activated by its inclusive innovation investments.
Dr Nisha Tandon is CEO of Arts Ekta, an award-winning social enterprise in central Belfast that promotes cultural diversity in Ireland. Nisha showed us how research relationships had grown over time through Historic Houses, Global Crossroads, a project that reimagined historic properties as inclusive global crossroads. CIP Lisa will collaborate with Nisha and Arts Ekta, to produce a co-created programme of creative activities inspired by the collections and sense of place at Mount Stewart, including its extensive gardens that have been nominated as a UNESCO world heritage site.
At Mount Stewart estate, we learned from community and volunteer manager and ‘BeHere’ project lead, Garret O’Fachtna and property curator, Rachel Brady about the inclusion work already being undertaken by the National Trust. The CIP award will help widen access to members of the public who might not otherwise visit, or even know about, Mount Stewart.
The opening visit offered a valuable introduction to the aims and vision of the ‘Be Here’ CIP project and its core research aims to unlock community heritage to enhance belonging, break down barriers to opportunity and address regional inequalities in the devolved context of Northern Ireland. As the research develops, Lisa and the National Trust will be capturing key learnings and experiences of co-creation and inclusive innovation in an episode of our podcast series, as well as a community case study and a policy paper on inclusive heritage for the NI Assembly.
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