PLANS announced by the Heritage Lottery Fund may have one foot in the past, but the focus is firmly set on the future.

Among the projects given grants were proposals set to celebrate the Millennium.

The Millennium Festival is partly supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and yesterday Chris Smith, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, unveiled plans in which volunteers from throughout the country can take part.

Keen Bolton photographers can volunteer to help photograph 360,000 listed buildings for the Millennium Festival's largest project, Images of England.

The project is managed by the National Monuments Record, the public archive of English Heritage.

The Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting the project with £3.09 million to create one of the world's largest, free, on-line picture libraries by the year 2002. Ponds, cobbled streets, lamp posts, skating rinks, horse troughs and telephone boxes will be posted into cyberspace together with the more expected catalogue of cottages, castles and churches.

The idea is to create a "point in time" record of England's rich and varied built heritage, to include buildings from every town and village in the land.

Volunteers should telephone 01793 414795 for further information.

Other Millennium plans include the Woodland Trust's plans to increase accessibility by creating new way-marked trails and a series of multi-media programmes for schoolchildren and groups who would not normally consider visiting ancient woodland, or who are restricted by lack of transport, finance or disability.

However, out of the long list of other smaller Millennium Festival projects granted money announced this week, there were only two within Greater Manchester - in Manchester and Rochdale.

In Manchester, £82,200 has been given to the National Museum of Labour History, to create various exhibitions concentrating on the theme of the growth of democracy.

And in Rochdale, the council has been granted £29,700 towards its project, Telling Tales.

Further grants of up to £5,000 for smaller local celebrations will be announced in September, with applications being invited from April.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.