Reimagining the National Marine Heritage Record for England

As of September 2024, the Marine Historic Environment Record Service for England (MHERSE) is the principal point of contact for enquiries regarding access to, and interpretation of, the National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR). Please get in touch with the Service at:

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 01793 445100

MHERSE has been established in conjunction with the development of a new database to accommodate and enhance the NMHR. When fully launched, currently estimated to take place in the second half of 2026, the new database system will also incorporate an online portal for searching and viewing NMHR data. As such, MHERSE, alongside this new system, will provide the key means through which the public, the academic community and commercial users will engage with Historic England’s continually evolving marine historic environment knowledge base, the product of decades of expertise from across the organisation.

It will also provide an opportunity for the public promotion and dissemination of Historic England’s ongoing marine work, including research, the protection of important marine archaeological sites and engagement with offshore planning and policy shaping.

Informing development and marine planning

The NMHR dataset is vital to informing assessments of significance for heritage assets under consideration for designation. In addition, it also informs the advice provided by Historic England to the Marine Management Organisation, the Planning Inspectorate, seabed developers and other partner organisations.

The need for a dedicated Marine HER Service with a forward-thinking, collaborative approach to data is demonstrated by the unprecedented scale of change to the seabed that is currently taking place. Production of electricity from offshore wind has risen from an operational capacity of under 700 Mega Watts in 2009 to more than 10,000 Mega Watts by the end of 2020.

Richer data from diverse sources

The new database designed specifically to accommodate and develop the NMHR has been created using Arches, an open-source cultural heritage inventory software platform originally developed for the cultural heritage field by the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund. Utilising Arches’ semantic, self-describing data modelling capabilities, resource models have been custom-built to better represent the complex and inter-related nature of the marine historic environment.

For example, rather than having a single ‘Maritime Craft’ record which represents both known wreck sites and their identification with a particular vessel, we have now separated ‘Wreck Site’ from ‘Maritime Vessel’. This will allow us to better record the life stories, from construction to loss, of the vessels themselves and create meaningful links with the people who built and crewed them, while separately recording the details of securely located archaeological remains of wrecks on the seabed or in the inter-tidal zone. It also allows these records to either stand alone or be related, thereby correctly representing documented lost vessels whose remains have never been located, known wreck sites whose identity has not been confirmed, and firmly identified wrecks.

The development of a dedicated marine resource will also allow for diverse datasets to be brought together in an integrated way. The Arches-based system will allow for resources to be brought together in association with broader thematic research topics or heritage stories, such as the strategic assessment of submarines in English waters undertaken to mark the centenary of the First World War. We will also be able to incorporate detailed site-specific data, such as the assessments of artefact assemblages from shipwrecks designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973.

Historic England have carried out this development alongside the Unpath’d Waters project, and the new system will contribute directly to the ambitions of the ‘Towards a National Collection’ programme. As Arches is open-source and encourages the creation of self-describing data, the system will also facilitate the simpler sharing of data, models and ideas with other partner organizations through cross-sector platforms such as the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN).

It is hoped that the Marine HER Service for England and the NMHR database will become firmly established as the first port of call for the recording, enhancement and dissemination of marine historic environment data, and help Historic England to ensure that heritage is fully embedded into policy and practice in the rapidly developing ‘blue economy’.

External engagement

Historic England has presented progress on developing the National Marine Heritage Record at the international Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA) in Amsterdam.

The paper presented an overview of the policies behind the National Marine Heritage Record and detailed some of the current thinking surrounding the semantic modelling. Historic England views the redevelopment of the National Marine Heritage Record as fundamental to improving the delivery of the organisation’s marine services.