The Lace Guild’s submission to the UK list of Living Heritage

Many of you are undoubtedly already aware that, in 2025, bobbin lacemaking was added to the Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts.

Heritage Crafts is the UK national charity for traditional heritage crafts. They are a UNESCO accredited NGO for Intangible Cultural Heritage (also called Living Heritage). They are an official Community Support Hub for the UK Government’s Living Heritage in the UK inventory, and have advocated for UK ratification of the UNESCO Convention of the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2010. The UK ratified the UNESCO convention in 2024.

The first round of submissions has been invited for the UK Government’s Inventories of Living Heritage.

The Lace Guild believes that lacemaking should be on this inventory.

We submitted an entry for bobbin lacemaking on 13th March 2026. This submission is on behalf of all lacemakers, not just Lace Guild members.

A big thank you to all who participated in our survey, and to those who prepared the submission.

Our submission will now go to the Review and Decision Panels. If accepted, it will be prepared for publication. It is expected that the first inventories will be published in about 4 – 6 months. Watch this space!

UPDATE – 7^th September 2026

We have received the following from UNESCO UK:

“Work is continuing on the inventories of living heritage, with the Review Panels for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland continuing to work through the submissions. This is taking longer than expected due to the volume and summer leave and so we don’t have a launch date scheduled yet, but we are still hopeful to launch later this year and will keep you updated.

We’re also looking at the next steps for safeguarding (more information here) that will be our focus early next year. More information to follow later this year.”.

We hope to submit other types of hand made lace in future rounds.