I use the word heritage in the sense employed by David Lowenthal in his book The Past is a Foreign Country. ‘...heritage is not an inquiry into past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present day purposes.’ Heritage is everywhere: on dedicated television channels and in hundreds of successful Hollywood films, heritage sites, folklore celebrations, glossy magazines, bestselling novels and nostalgic commercial adverts. Heritage may borrow from history and may even be produced by historians, but they share a common non-historical, present orientated purpose: they use the past to entertain, to inspire, to engage, to provide identity and to sell to us, in the here and now.

Many people may do things that look similar to history and may have similar qualifications – they may teach history, direct historical documentary films, curate in museums – but these people generally are not historians. This is important because although they may do many useful things with the past – teach children, inform a wider public, preserve documents – their primary purpose is not the same as the historians. As a history teacher my primary purpose is prepare students for history examinations, this is not what historians do.