The Places of Poetry will create a distinctive digital map of England and Wales, onto which crowd-sourced poems of place, heritage and identity will be pinned in the course of a public campaign in the late-spring and summer of 2019. The project aims to prompt reflection on national and cultural identities in England and Wales, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place. The project thus combines a model from the past - the early seventeenth-century epic of national description, Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion - with a commitment to the value of creative practice in the present day. Poly-Olbion has been the subject of an editorial and critical project led by the PI on this application, Andrew McRae. That project also involved some public-facing work, supported further by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which helped to demonstrate the power today of both Drayton's work and the distinctive county maps published with the poem, by the engraver William Hole. Meanwhile, the poet Paul Farley (Co-I on this project), has spent a number of years working on a twenty-first-century reconceptualization of Poly-Olbion (due for publication with Faber in 2019). This led to the collaboration at the heart of 'The Places of Poetry'. The new map of England and Wales will draw heavily upon the iconography of Hole's original works, but will be amended as necessary and lightly updated. Since Drayton and Hole only covered England and Wales, The Places of Poetry will also limit itself to these two British nations. The map will be overlaid upon Ordnance Survey data, with functions enabling users not only to zoom in and out, but also to slide between the two maps. Users will be encouraged to pin poems to particular places. The map will be pre-populated with a selection of historic (out of copyright) pieces; however, the project's central aim is to generate original work. The project website, with the map as its central and defining image, will aim to introduce users to the poetry of place, heritage and identity, and will provide materials designed to coach them through their own compositions. After a period of preparatory work, The Places of Poetry will be promoted through the course of an intensive campaign in the summer of 2019. This will include: a launch event, BBC radio programmes, a national writing-workshops tour, a short film, and social media activity. The project involves strategic collaborations with The Poetry Society and The Ordnance Survey. Although the project is technically freestanding, a positive response to the present application will trigger further applications (already in advanced states) to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council, for a parallel package of work that would significantly enhance the reach and value of the project. This will be centred on activities with major regional arts and heritage partners, and involving a programme of poets-in-residence. It will focus on particular user-communities (e.g. age, location, background), and different kinds of heritage (e.g. pre-historic, Roman, agricultural, industrial, religious, natural). The website will remain open for contributions for ten weeks. Towards the end of this period, the PI will write a reflective article about the project. As a legacy, there may be opportunities for commercial development, while the site will remain in existence after the project closes, as an archive of the poetry of place, heritage and identity in the summer of 2019.