The first of these, Regeneration Through Heritage, promotes the re-use of heritage industrial buildings, by assisting community-based partnerships to find new uses for these, otherwise redundant, buildings. Regeneration Through Heritage supports ten projects, with a total development value of C50 million, of which £34 million has been secured so far, by providing skills and support on conservation, architecture and business planning. Regeneration Through Heritage is funded by English Heritage and private sector companies.

The second initiative concerned with the regeneration of historic buildings is the Phoenix Trust, a charitable company that acquires, repairs and finds new uses for major historic buildings which might otherwise fall into decay or face demolition. The Prince of Wales launched the Trust in 1997 at Stanley Mills on the River Tay near Perth. This group of redundant mill buildings was the trust's inaugural project, involving conversion of two buildings into houses and flats. Other Phoenix Trust schemes are spread across the United Kingdom.

The Prince's Foundation is also concerned with improving the quality of the unlisted built environment. It does this through the work of the projects team, working with the regional development agencies and other partners on a number of large-scale, area-based urban quarter regeneration projects. The built heritage is a key factor in helping to attract new activities and uses to such areas, breathing new life into previously derelict and forgotten parts of our towns and cities.

Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter is one such area. The Prince's Foundation has been working closely with Birmingham City Council, Advantage West Midlands and other partners to regenerate the quarter as a mixed, sustainable and inclusive urban village. The Jewellery Quarter Urban Village project seeks to achieve a more responsive and intelligent approach to the integration of new homes, shops, commercial, employment and community uses, while protecting the existing jewellery manufacturing and retail base.

As such, the guiding principle behind the Jewellery Quarter Urban Village Framework Plan, commissioned by the Foundation, Advantage West Midlands and Birmingham City Council, and adopted in 1998, was to lift the particularly restrictive land-use policies which were an impediment to regeneration. The aim was to do this in a way which prevented wholesale

Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter covers an area of around 107 hectares. While located immediately adjacent to the city centre, it is isolated from Birmingham's main commercial and retail core by the inner ring road which was constructed in the 1960s.

Fortunately, this enforced isolation has protected the Jewellery Quarter from the worst excess of 1960s and 1970s town planning experiments and preserved an almost intact Georgian/Victorian street structure.

The 1980s and early 1990s saw a number of public sector led regeneration initiatives in the Jewellery Quarter. While these proved successful in their own right, they had not created sustained regeneration activity.

When the Prince's Foundation became involved in initial discussions on the regeneration of the Jewellery Quarter, we found an area suffering from a very high number of derelict and vacant sites and premises, but with many handsome buildings offering huge regeneration potential - with St Paul's Square at the heart of the quarter being Birmingham's last remaining Georgian Square.

The Jewellery Quarter Regeneration Partnership, created in 1998, was tasked with creating investor confidence in the area and taking the lead in efforts to introduce a wide variety of new uses. This included establishing a substantial residential population with around 2,000 new homes, without changing the Jewellery Quarter's natural and very sensitive business 'eco-system', reliant on the many different specialisms which exist within the quarter.

This has acted as a sophisticated and positive piece of planning which has provided the necessary market certainty by directly encouraging change of use in certain areas, while protecting the status quo in others.

More recently, the emphasis of the Jewellery Quarter Regeneration Partnership has been on managing the pressure for change stimulated by regeneration activity. The designation of the whole of the Jewellery Quarter as a conservation area, with the conservation area plan providing continued support for the policies contained in the urban framework plan, has strengthened the controls provided by such policies to prevent manufacturing businesses being displaced by other uses, particularly new homes.

Conservation area designation has also provided a basis for the preparation of a further, more detailed layer of design guidance. This aims to raise the stakes even higher in terms of what is expected from developers wishing to promote schemes within the quarter.

The Jewellery Quarter Regeneration Partnership is concerned, not so much with creating investor confidence and putting the Jewellery Quarter on the map, but with focussing on achieving strategic interventions to produce the uses and activities which will make the Jewellery Quarter a true urban village. This will involve providing social, community, health and other infrastructure necessary to support a residential population nearing 4,000, together with a growing business population.

In addition to efforts to protect the quarter's unique characteristics as a major European centre for the manufacture and retail of jewellery, its business base is beginning to diversify, attracting new business, particularly those entrepreneurial activities which seek to locate in a mixed neighbourhood offering a range of opportunities for interaction and exchange. One very significant addition is the new regional headquarters of Bass which is currently being constructed in the Jewellery Quarter. Bass preferred this location to the sterility of an edge-of-town business park.

What makes the regeneration activity of the Jewellery Quarter distinctive from most other regeneration projects in the UK is the resolve of the Jewellery Quarter Partnership, and both existing business and new residents, to ensure that regeneration does not lead to the sterility found in many area-based regeneration projects.

The key factor contributing to this is the decision to retain manufacturing business in the area. This has helped to keep its distinctiveness. 'Shabby chic' is a cliche, but one which has been used by a number of those living and working in the area to describe what makes the Jewellery Quarter particularly attractive to them.

This certainly sits within the ambition of the partnership to ensure that the Jewellery Quarter remains an alternative to the large institutionally led investment in other areas and stands as a national exemplar of creating true sustainable regeneration.

Heritage has played a central role in all of this, with the more recent domestic architecture suddenly punctuated by wonderful examples of Georgian and Victorian excess, providing a scale which gives reference points to guide the types of uses and activities now being tempted into the quarter.

The challenge is to keep a balance between the intense development pressure from the private sector stimulated by regeneration efforts, and the small jewellery manufacturers and retailers who give character to the area. At the same time the aim is to achieve good contemporary architecture in new development, using proper proportioning systems which are respectful of the Jewellery Quarter's rather eclectic - but nevertheless harmonious - mix of styles.