Conserving:

Historic Landscapes and Planning

Both national planning policy and the AONB management plan demonstrate that a full understanding of the historic aspects of landscape and their contribution to wider landscape character, local distinctiveness and sense of place is crucial both for:

  • Ensuring a full regard for the purposes of conserving and enhancing natural beauty
  • Ensuring the fullest range of historic environment attributes at a landscape scale form part of planning policy and development control decisions.

The first step in this process as outlined by English Heritage guidance is the collation of an evidence base for plan making. Two such evidence bases focusing specifically on the historic landscape exist for the designated landscape of the AONB

  • An AONB wide Historic Landscape Characterisation
  • Historic Environment Action Plans.

Annual AONB Planning and Transportation Seminar

The applications of these datasets for planning were introduced at the AONB Annual Planning and Transportation Seminar on Wednesday 14th May 2010. The day was entitled Planning and Historic Landscapes and aimed to

  • Add value to previous learning and understanding of landscape characterisation.
  • Introduce participants to the significance of Historic Landscape Characterisation and Historic Environment Action Plans to policy planning and project approval.
  • Enable participants to use landscape characterisation resources such as HLC and HEAPs to enhance their own work and to have confidence to know when and how to request further relevant information.

The presentations given at this seminar can be downloaded by clicking here. The AONB is currently turning the examples given at this seminar into a guidance document.

B3081 Historic Landscape Appraisal

This new study aims to demonstrate how the AONB wide Historic Landscape Characterisation and Historic Environment Action Plans can be used to provide a deeper understanding of the archaeological and historical aspects of rural roads across the landscape of the AONB. A compressed version of this study can be accessed by clicking here. Alternatively contact the AONB office for a high resolution version of this report