It is possible to destroy the aesthetic merit of a listed building by building something big enough and ugly enough next to it. We have all witnessed this happen; usually the damage was dealt several decades ago. A perfect example in my locality, Norwich, was the decision in the mid-20th century to rip up Magdalen Street which runs through the north side of the city centre. A main road flyover (aptly named ‘Stump Cross’) was installed exactly half-way through the street. The street was severed in two. Either side of the concrete hulk, there is a series of Grade II listed buildings from the 17th century onwards, as well as the Grade I listed church of St Saviour. The road not only creates a shady, disused cave halfway through the street and detracts hugely from the beautiful early structures around it.
We live in a very different policy environment from the mid-20th century. Extreme top-down measures like this are no longer possible. Taken in isolation, this is a good thing.
Today, however, the challenges are different. The political and human consequences of not building enough homes or infrastructure represent a radically different extreme. After the 1970s, we as a nation replaced the construction bold and occasionally callous buildings with, well, a lack of buildings. This wasn’t so much a response to the problem as an abdication of the duty—and the pleasure—of adding to our built landscapes. This comes with its own collateral damage.
One element of this collateral damage has been the great slowdown of new architecture in Britain. In short, it has become very difficult to construct genuinely beautiful structures on many sites if they are near a historic building or in a conservation area. By contrast, the worst problems of 20th century development were not about construction, but about outright destruction. Demolition is, by definition, irreversible.
Conservation involves a lot more than resisting demolition. Most importantly, there is the question that we began with, what we should be allowed to build in the context of important heritage. But clear principles are needed. To get answers, we should ask ourselves simple and fundamental questions about architecture.
Does a new structure harm the setting of a revered historic building simply because it is there? I would answer no. The effect of new buildings on those of the past is based primarily on quality, not quantity. The question that follows is this: does our current planning system enable this important distinction to be made? Does the planning system reward high quality design in better materials as a way of getting things built in sensitive contexts, or is size the only factor?
At this point, one needs to turn to concrete examples to see how this works in practice. One high-profile instance was on grounds adjacent to Wolfeton House, in Dorset. Wolfeton House is a large late-medieval gentry house with surrounding lands and ancillary buildings. The core of the house is well preserved, and as a result it is Grade I listed.
The site in question where a housing development had been proposed was a field adjacent to the property. It was, therefore, within the ‘setting’ of the listed building. Protections on settings are as strong as the legal protection of listed buildings themselves.
In order to protect the setting of this important building, the builder had to adjust their proposals. They nonetheless lost the first round of planning applications, which began in 2017, followed by an appeal which was dismissed. They reduced the count of buildings from 120 to 80, and resubmitted.
Their new submission included a Heritage Impact Assessment (designed to deal with the changes to the setting of Wolfeton House) which ran to 149 pages. The HIA went to great lengths to demonstrate the change between the two schemes, and the extent to which the impact of the housing development had been limited by the reduced scale. Extensive visualisations also showed the ways in which the development would scarcely be visible from the Grade I listed house. Again, it must be stated that these changes had already resulted in the loss of a third of the homes.
The planning application was rejected once again, this time in late 2021. Thus, a grand total of four years had passed, without anything being built. At present, the planning application is being considered at appeal. The reason for refusal came down to the concept of settings. The planning officers stated that:
“Undeveloped rural surroundings of Wolfeton House allow the viewer to understand and appreciate its importance, past and present. The open, rural, setting contributes to the significance of the Grade I listed building […] The rural isolation of the property would be irreversibly affected”
There are some troubling implications to this. How widely must this rural setting be drawn? If we imagine the site ten years into the future, and every plot of land surrounding the Grade I listed house that is allowed to be developed, is built upon, we would end up with a thin green ring around the House. That would be a de facto green belt. Remember that we’re not discussing any changes to the house or even the grounds but instead simply the development of a nearby plot. Would we have protected anything truly valuable enforcing this at the cost of potentially hundreds of new homes?
The concept of a listed building’s setting should not be used to fit the square peg of medieval settlement patterns into the round hole of modern population. There is a second problem here. Can the basic ‘rural’ nature of any building really be said to constitute an integral part of its meaning when it is not specific to that building? By that logic huge, beautiful, swathes of London should never have been built to preserve the ‘rural’ nature of existing, medieval towns.
In the end, though, none of this discussion should matter because planning policy, as written (though not as practised) admits the fact that the setting of any building is changeable. As settings are defined in the NPPF:
“[Settings are] the surroundings in which a heritage asset is experienced. Its extent is not fixed and may change as the asset and its surroundings evolve.”
The way to make these changes beneficial, rather than destructive, returns us to the question of quality and quantity. The planning officer for the Wolfeton House setting housing development did not once mention the quality of the proposed buildings in terms of design or materials. That’s worth emphasising. The actual design of these buildings in this, most sensitive of locations, was taken to be irrelevant to the discussion.
Settings of listed buildings could do with a more nuanced treatment. The quality of a design—use of stock bricks rather than facing bricks, a well-considered facade free of plastic paraphernalia like weep vents or meter boxes, an elegant set of proportions—should offset the ‘impact’ of a building’s scale. Bigger buildings which are pleasant to look at are fundamentally better for the historic environment than ugly buildings which are reduced in size.
One reason that some developers can get away with poor quality facades is because they know that planning authorities and local pressure groups prioritise pushing against height over design: just knock the total height down by a couple of metres and squish the ceilings down internally to fit the same number of rooms in and you can get away with an ugly box. This is ‘sensitivity’ to the historical environment by numbers—literally.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Planning policy should not only enable but encourage beautiful developments near historic buildings. We should be building the country we want to live in – the buildings later generations will deem worthy of protecting.
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