C O N T E X T 1 1 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 0 13 remain necessary. But they are no longer enough on their own. Newer social aspirations for heritage, and national objectives for increasingly participative spatial planning, can not be delivered by designation-led approaches, even if one day thoroughly reformed. For all their advantages, designation-led systems are not suited to managing change and assisting in design everywhere, in all the many places that do not meet national standards of heritage-ness. Most people live and invest their lives beyond the conservation area and outside the listed building’s curtilage. Most people’s views (in either sense, of what they think about their surroundings, and what they see from their living room window or car windscreen) are unnoticed or unarticulated. An important role for conservation professionals is thus to contextualise people’s everyday surroundings – in the same way that the rich resource of the ordinary everyday historic environment contextualises the narrower range of selected assets in the national heritage system. All the new planning policy statements provide a strong platform for this in their frequent reiteration of the need for development to capitalise on the existing, inherited character of place. There is also relevant recent guidance from other quarters, for example CABE (www.cabe.org.uk/publications/character-andidentity) and the Homes and Communities Agency (www.homesandcommunities.co.uk/public/documents/HCA_Historical_Characterisation_Accessible_ version.pdf). Many recent historic characterisation projects (such as www.helm.org.uk/server/show/category.19604), carried out or sponsored by English Heritage and local government, or by developers, show how an evidence base can be prepared for this approach. Perhaps most relevant for the next step is the Lincoln Townscape Assessment (LTA), a characterisation of all aspects of the city’s historic character from its Romanmedieval core to the early 21st residential estates at the city’s edge, and even beyond. The LTA embraced participative techniques and extended the view from the expert to the public. Its results are available at www.heritageconnectlincoln.com. These ideas are not new. They were not even new in 2000 during the review that led to Power of Place, when they and more far-reaching proposals were discussed but caused anxiety and a slight turning back to more comfortable certainties. Since 2000 they have been reinforced and will repay re-examination at the next pause for professional collective reflection and reinvention. They have been reinforced by many things. Books like Linsey Hanley’s Estates (Granta, 2007) have helped to raise awareness of socio-economic contexts missed by traditional conservation approaches. Steps towards more participative spatial planning have brought these things into better focus too. As well as the Lincoln Townscape Assessment, a number of large-scale historic character projects in metropolitan regions (and more detailed historic area assessments) have considered relatively objectively the historic character of all their parts, not only their conventionally ‘historic’ cores. The results are more useful for spatial planning than for conservation. They avoid qualitative judgement in favour of providing others with evidence to inform their own views of their historic environment, to recalibrate their perceptions of their landscapes and to form views that can shape future decisions. The English Heritage book Images of Change (2007) (and its programme Change and Creation, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~arch0217/ changeandcreation/), for example, encouraged a view of the past 30 years of large-scale change in England’s landscape on its own terms; not as modern damage, but as another layer in the landscape’s changing character, with its own historical explanation and justification, whether we wish to value it or not. These ideas are reinforced by new audiences as area- and character-based approaches to conservation and planning are taken up in local government. Character Pier Road, Greenhithe. A timeless view of river and river town, but the view is from the awardwinning development at Ingress Park towards the Dartford Crossing.The experience of being here, the sense of place, is 21st century and new, at odds with the apparent focus of the view.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=