Historic Environment Scotland
Protecting and celebrating Scotland's historic environment.
Historic England
Unlocking hidden histories across England
The ask
Historic England embarked on a multi-year project to connect with audiences traditionally less engaged with heritage. Their vision was to create a digital experience that would enable users to explore historical places across England - from counties and districts to cities and major towns - bringing the nation’s rich history to life in a locally relevant way. To deliver this ambition, they sought a strategic digital partner who could help design a solution that would broaden public interest and access to heritage information.
The core challenge was to specify and deliver a scalable website with an intuitive, user-friendly interface that made it easy to discover heritage locations. Central to the brief was a powerful geospatial search feature that could handle complex queries and provide accurate, engaging results. Additionally, the project required intelligent content management, powered by AI, to efficiently handle and categorise the vast volume of data and assets associated with England’s historic places.
What we did
As part of a multi-phased delivery approach, we developed a robust and scalable digital solution for Historic England. Central to this was the creation of a new Umbraco-based website, supported by a custom .NET API that provides a layer of abstraction over data from ElasticSearch.
We implemented a .NET API to provide a layer of abstraction over the ElasticSearch data source, providing critical benefits by enforcing security and centralising business logic while decoupling the frontend from the backend implementation. This approach allowed for the shape of the data to be optimised to increase efficiency, and support versioning for a smoother evolution of the application. The API also enables consistent validation, streamlined monitoring, analytics and testing, whilst supporting future data aggregation from multiple sources with minimal impact. Overall, this resulted in a more secure, maintainable and scalable architecture.
To deliver a flexible and user friendly solution, we leveraged Umbraco for the client-facing application to empower content editors with control over the structure of the location pages. We created a custom Client Library that automatically pulls through the all the page content from the API. Each location page was composed of several modular components, each configurable with options such as the number of items to display, titles, introductory text and links. These components could be re-ordered within Umbraco and toggled on or off as needed, providing a degree of editorial control while the bulk of the content is automated via the API. Additionally, content editors were given the capability to override the default images supplied by the API, ensuring visual consistency and brand alignment where necessary.
We worked in close collaboration with the internal design and UX team at Historic England, engaging in iterative design processes to ensure the final product met both user needs and stakeholder expectations. A bespoke Umbraco front-end was developed, incorporating Historic England’s existing libraries to maintain brand consistency and facilitate a smooth handover back to the internal team. Throughout the development process, accessibility was a central focus, ensuring the frontend was inclusive and compliant with best practice accessibility standards from the outset.
To streamline content operations we also leveraged AI to build a .NET API as a suite of tools for internal content and data management, extending its use beyond just the Local Heritage Hub service to benefit the wider organisation. This included automated text summarisation, image classification to identify compelling visual assets, geolocation tagging to match content with specific places, and advanced text tagging and classification. These capabilities were built using Azure OpenAI services and supported by Prompt Flow evaluations, enabling Historic England to manage the scale of content while ensuring relevance and engagement across thousands of heritage records.
"The final product has exceeded all our expectations"
"Thanks to Storm ID - we wouldn't have a product to launch without your work, and you've done an amazing job of bringing our vision to life. It's been a pleasure working with you on this."
Visit the Historic England Local Heritage Hub today:
historicengland.org.uk/local/
