C O N T E X T 1 3 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 3 31 side heritage seaside ritage Our seaside her Our seaside heritag seaside heritage Our itage Our seaside her seaside heritage Our seaside he for the historic environment within the sectoral system was patchy, and largely reliant on regulations relating to environmental impact assessment that applied only to larger developments.There were no overarching policies. The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 introduced and gave statutory effect to the UK Marine Policy Statement (UK MPS), published in 2011. It also introduced a requirement for marine plans to cover each sea area out to the limit of the continental shelf. The UK MPS and area-based marine plans apply not only to decisions about marine licences, but also to all decisions by public bodies relating to their activities in the UK marine area. The UK MPS contains a section on the historic environment that is broadly consistent with the National Planning Policy Framework and other national-level policy documents across the UK.There is recognition of designated heritage assets, undesignated heritage assets and the potential for as yet unknown assets (a particular concern in the marine environment, as knowing ‘what is out there’ remains a major source of uncertainty). It is expected that marine plans will also contain express policies on the historic environment.These plans are in the process of being prepared. Importantly, the UK MPS and marine plans are intended to overlap physically with land-based planning across the inter-tidal zone. Broadly, land-based planning extends to low-tide, whereas marine planning extends throughout tidal waters to high-tide. The degree of overlap may be considerable as the tidal waters of most estuaries – and hence the extent of marine plans – often runs far inland. The overlap is intended to cement the integration of the two planning regimes; in any particular place, respective policies require land-based plans and marine plans to be consistent and complementary. Quite what this will mean, and how it will be achieved, with respect to the historic environment is not yet clear. Marine plans generally cover much larger areas than land-based plans: the East Inshore marine plan area, for example, encompasses local authorities from Suffolk to the East Riding of Yorkshire. Marine plans are also expected to be less detailed than land-based plans, so it is difficult to see, for example, how the historic environment policies of myriad coastal authorities will be reconciled with perhaps one or two historic environment policies for the overlapping marine area. Nonetheless, the new framework means that the historic environment implications of marine development should be taken into considerationmore consistently than before, and they will be subject to policies consistent with, and to some extent informed by, historic environment policies on land. In return, this might be expected to increase the flow of information about the marine historic environment into the management of the historic environment on land. By way of example, there has been a major leap forward in the capability to investigate large areas of seabed.This is, to some extent, a product of integration of archaeology within development offshore, but it is also technological. Routinely, various forms of imaging the seafloor and sub-surface are being deployed that provide a far more detailed picture of individual features such as wrecks, or of entire landscapes.This last point is especially important. The periodic discovery of prehistoric artefacts from the sea, dating to times of lower sea level when much of the continental shelf formed inhabitable land, has been known for over a century. But it is only in the last decade or so that we have gained the capacity to start mapping and investigating these former land surfaces in detail, producing artefacts up to 200,000 years old. This will increasingly affect howwe think about earlier prehistoric sites on today’s coast, including the significance we attach to them and the provision we make for their management and conservation. In the muchmore recent past, increasing archaeological attention is being paid to the remains of vessels from the 19th and 20th centuries, including the smaller vernacular craft used for fishing and local trade. The forthcoming centenary of the first world war is also prompting interest in the thousands of vessels and seafarers lost off the UK as a result of enemy action.These wrecks – merchant ships, fishing boats and minor warships – are a reminder that the first world war was not fought only on theWestern Front or Gallipoli, but also within sight of our shores. There are all sorts of opportunities to invoke the marine historic environment in how we conserve and present the historic environment onshore, but there are some challenges too. There are some particularly complex interrelationships between development and issues relating to landscape, seascape and the setting of historic assets, for example. Do the submerged wrecks of ships and aircraft have a setting, for instance? Can seascapes have a historic element to their character that might be affected by a prominent development on the seafront? Does a distant offshore wind turbine with a design life of 25 years have a significant effect on a cliff-top fort that is 2,000 years old?These are difficult questions that must prompt us to consider what the sea has meant to people in the past, and what it might mean to us today and in the future. This is just the barest outline of a few aspects of heritage at sea and its conservation, but it should at least demonstrate that the marine historic environment is no longer just a handful of old wrecks of incidental relevance. The UK’s marine heritage is one of its greatest assets, and we now have the opportunity to make something of it. Antony Firth is the director of Fjordr Limited. The steam engine is the most prominent part of the wreck of the Concha, lying off Littlehampton in West Sussex.The Concha, a Belgian ore-carrying steamer built in 1877, sank in 1897 after colliding with another steamship.
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