Planning and the Historic Environment 2002
An Agenda for the 21st century – 17 May 2002
Adjusting Vertical and Horizontal Hold - the Real Joined-Up-Ness
David Baker
Historic Environment Conservation
This paper originated in an over-ambitious desire to test whether the idea of the historic
environment is perceived in distinctively different ways in various parts of the United
Kingdom. Ambition was thwarted by two perceptions, that 25 years of working in
Bedfordshire was not the broadest basis of geographical experience, and that the
question begs other, more fundamental, questions about the definition and meaning of
‘historic environment’. Refocus was encouraged by a comment from another of today’s
speakers: ‘I’m rather going off the historic environment’. Has it indeed become another
managerial hi-jack victim (like vision, mission and passion), over-used and worn into a
smooth mantra ? Might it be unsafe to base ‘Agenda for the 21st century’ on the concept
of an ‘indivisible historic environment’ if it isn’t actually indivisible, or worse still, is
unhelpfully divisible ? So we need some clarity about what is, or should be, ‘joined-up’ –
hence my sub-title. What follows has a three-fold aim: to revisit the idea of the historic
environment through a framework model of ‘content – process – users’; to start
exploring how far this illuminates what appears to unite or divide the interests of our two
sponsoring Institutes; and, finally, to offer some thoughts about matters that should
underlie those Agenda for the 21st century.
The idea of an historic environment
The term ‘historic environment’ has been around for over three decades, even longer than
this series of conferences. It is one of those phrases that combines description with
undertones of advocacy, implying it is really everywhere but somehow stopping at that
implication, subliminally asking everyone to be in favour of it without first offering a
justifying analysis. Some kind of conceptual framework is needed. One I have found
helpful has three interlocking elements, content (what is in it); process (how we manage
it) and users (the interests for whom it is managed). It is the connections that matter;
their presence or absence can usually explain why something goes right or wrong.
Content
The idea of the historic environment emerged as the fusion of two elements, sometime in
the late 60s and early 70s. One was the amplification of historical concerns about
environmental damage caused by development and other destructive human activities,
extending or borrowing from natural environment and ecological interests. It defined the
historic environment simply and broadly as the remains of past material culture, the
evidence for the interactive impact of humankind upon the natural world from the earliest
times up to yesterday. The other element, helping articulate this totality, was current
academic trends including the development of landscape archaeology and the analysis of
settlements as organized places and townscape as well as collections of individual
historic buildings. That perception chimed well with the ability of the natural
environment lobby to portray the threat intelligibly at several scales, from local habitats
and recognizable species, through the survival of the human race and up to the capacity
of the planet itself to support life.
On these beginnings one could base the Russian-doll model of the historic environment,
rising up (or down) from portable artefacts and building details, through sites of former
occupation and occupied buildings, to landscapes and townscapes inhabited and formerly
inhabited, to island and planet. For all its limitations, it was quite a good way of saying
that what individual survivals represented had contexts and inter-relationships, vertically
by scale and horizontally through function, often cutting across traditional professional or
academic divisions; those inter-connections are an important facet of what we now call
‘significance’.
Process
Threat stimulates a need to protect, identifies a public interest in private property, gives
choices about appropriate preservation strategies, and makes us ask why we are doing it
all in the first place.
The process model is a linear one of ‘investigate / understand > conserve / record >
explain’. It also embodies a repeating cycle of conservation and / or investigation by
which each episode adds to understanding. Thus each iteration, if carried through
properly, ought to improve the basis for decision-making in the next episode and increase
the interest and support for doing it.
Process raises issues at many scales. A few random examples include how to get the right
lime mix for various tasks, whether single-context field recording bestows objectivity,
how to relate the integrity of an historic building and continuing owners’ needs in the
matter of extensions, and how to meld urban design and historic character in major
redevelopment schemes. An essential lubricant of process is information; there is debate
about how far its role differs in above- and below-ground conservation work.
Users
As recognised content has become more extensive, and process has become increasingly
complex, so the need for justification has grown. The argument that the study of the past
is self-justifying – the proper study of man is mankind – is no longer adequate by itself
for an activity with today’s economic, social and cultural claims. Indeed, the realisation
has dawned that the third element of the framework, the users of the historic
environment, is perhaps the first. In this matter the outside world has shown our worlds
the route to go. Too often, however, the vocabulary has been unhelpfully managerial /
commercial, allowing too many of us to ask what it all has to do with us, instead of
asking why we are doing what we do and for whom.
The range of uses for the historic environment is by now fairly commonplace and well
understood. They can be characterized as continuing use, custodianship, research
(primary and personal), education and enjoyment / entertainment. These categories cause
the historic environment to pop up in various guises, such as culture, environment,
economic regenerator, etc. This is double-edged: on the one hand we are increasingly
celebrate this complex and multiple relevance, while on the other we bemoan its
consequent distribution around the responsibilities of between three and five government
departments, which politically diluting its importance, causing fragmentation and neglect.
A user focus – usefulness and intelligibility
We require some commonality of approach to the needs of users. Criteria of usefulness
and intelligibility can be applied to the three elements of the framework.
Usefulness applied to content distinguishes two broad classes, relatively intact survivals
still with functioning original and / or alternative uses, and those that are incomplete,
relict and have lost their original uses. Some of the latter retain a wider visual or
commemorative interest; others are only reservoirs of information for what has been
destroyed or might be reconstructed. Usefulness applied to process, also distinguishes
two broad classes, traditionally ‘conservation’ allowing change to ensure continuing use,
associated with buildings in use, and ‘preservation as found’ in an attempt to keep the
curve of the decay path as flat as possible, associated with relict monuments and ruins.
The first too easily gets equated with historic buildings conservation and the second with
archaeology, when actually, it is more complicated, and rather more is shared by both
activities. Archaeological process must be part of the investigation that must inform
conservation, and historic building conservation often includes elements that are less
useful or without uses. Usefulness applied to users gets into complex combinations of
values, economic, social, cultural, spiritual, etcetera. Economic factors are a principal
driver, sharpen distinctions between so-called usefulness and uselessness. Through
economic spectacles the historic environment is seen as a cultural injection into economic
regeneration that enhances the social end-product; most rescue archaeology is perceived
not as a contribution to knowledge and local environmental awareness so much as part of
an economic equation for commercial developers and commercial field units. But a key
point is that the wider and more ‘social’ the range of uses (as distinct from economic), the
greater is the potential for the common and shared engagement of traditional
archaeological and historic buildings concerns.
Intelligibility applied to content raises issues about understanding what something was
originally and what changes have happened in the past. This involves imaginative leaps
to deal with what is now missing, associated events and original context. It also raises
issues about understanding significance now, which can involve a range of historical and
non-historical factors, the latter quite easily changing with fashion and circumstances. As
with content and process, there is a good meeting point for the small-‘a’ archaeological
skills needed in logical reconstruction and the architectural or design skills for
appreciating how places and their buildings worked in the past. Also, practitioners of all
archaeological and conservation skills need to approach contemporary significances with
awareness and sensitivity.
The challenges of intelligibility as applied to process are well illustrated by an interesting
recent comment to me by Andy Walters on the workings of the Flemish Monument
Watch scheme. This was in response to the recent publication on the IHBC web-site of
my short report on specialized information systems supporting conservation officers.
“Despite having a greater availability of repair and maintenance grants, access to a
subsidized condition survey scheme and a digitized integrated planning system which
exchanges information between the various bodies involved with applications, the whole
structure is struggling against uninformed owners and managers. The system was failing
the ultimate end user, in that it was not educating them. Owners were left feeling baffled
and confused by a plethora of listed building planning legislation, technical architectural
language and abstract theoretical concepts of the broader implications of conservation”.
The message here reinforces that those who operate process must ensure the systems they
devise provide explanation as well as investigation and conservation.
Intelligibility as applied to users helps remind us that some understand or appreciate their
piece of the historic environment more readily than others. Some don’t want to know,
some want to but don’t know how and need help, while a minority of people do know and
hopefully also know what they don’t know. Recent analyses of information needs, work
done with Julian Richards and Gill Chitty, emphasized that good system-building must
start from the user end rather than with hardware and software. Users divide into two
broad classes, those who can access raw system-stored information about elements of the
historic environment directly (researchers and conservers), and those who need to have
the information mediated, by the system managers or third parties in order to be able to
use it (most teachers, owners, local communities, tourists etcetera). The latter group is of
course by far the largest, the democratic justification and currently the least well provided
for. In 1998 educational and general public interest users of SMRs were less than 10% of
their predominantly development and conservation –related customers. In 2001 between
a half and two-thirds of all local authority conservation officers had no specialist
supporting information system of any kind whatsoever; there was nothing that could be
accessed by an interested public beyond what might be in a hard-pressed conservation
officer’s head.
Divisions real and imagined – what unites and divides us
Moving on now to those professions. A framework model of content – process – users is
only a tool, a means to an end, a logical underpinning for promoting policy and pointing
up unforeseen problems in well-intentioned political initiatives. One of the major
difficulties in making headway with many problems, particularly over resources, is the
picture of fragmentation and disunity we present. Is this type of framework equally
acceptable to everyone here and therefore able to reinforce the image and interests of the
sector on the wider stage of life ? So the second main part of this paper discusses some
of the tensions that prompted the organisation of this day school, amazingly probably the
first full-frontal joint-sponsorship of a conference or course by the two principal
professional Institutes in the sector. Why has it taken so long ? Is there a fundamental
divide between archaeology and conservation or are we merely trapped in our own pasts
and using words badly ?
History rather suggests that there is a divide. Evidence of divisibility came at the outset in
the 1970s, with the formation of two distinct pressure groups, RESCUE for archaeology
and SAVE for historic buildings, which ploughed their individually distinctive furrows in
the field of causes celebres, communicating minimally. The emerging professionals
organised, again separately. Local government archaeologists were first in the early
1970s, followed by the managers of archaeological field units, a distinction that was to
become increasingly significant as so-called ‘public’ archaeology became commodified
by the forces that ultimately produced PPG16. Conservation officers in local government
organised themselves in the early 1980s.
But history is one thing, and the future is another. Are the differences are circumstantial
or intrinsic ? Do the two approaches actually share a broad framework of content –
process – users ? If not, we need go no further. If they do, is it as two parallel largely
unconnected versions, or is there some inter-connectedness ? If the latter, is it
occasional, for selected aspects or stages only, or rather more extensive than that ?
Circumstance includes legislation and administrative arrangements. The legislative
pattern is familiar and does not need recounting in any detail. Two sets of codes have
grown up separately, in England the Ancient Monuments Acts and measures for Listed
Buildings and Conservation Areas within the Planning Acts, amplified by separate
planning guidance documents. Interestingly, the archaeological provisions are the older,
but the two codes have developed on a leap-frogging basis. The early Ancient
Monuments Acts reflected political views that their subject is useless and defenceless
while owners could be expected to look after useful property. The post-War Planning
Acts extended a public interest in private property to designated elements in the useful
fabric of everyday life, and introduced much more widespread controls over historic
buildings. The introduction of what planning jargon calls ‘material considerations’,
associated with growing environmental awareness, then led to still more potentially
pervasive controls outside specific designations in the form of the arrangements
facilitated by PPG16 for archaeological conservation. Interestingly, it also opened up a
path for convergence of process with its insistence that planning decisions affecting
important archaeological sites should be fully informed by proper understanding of what
is affected. Significantly, this was expressed less firmly and clearly in what PPG15 says
about historic buildings, and continues to be much less supported legislatively in building
conservation. It is much harder and more labour-intensive to put in place and properly
manage an equivalent level of controls for historic buildings in the form of Article 4
Directions.
The administrative pattern, naturally enough, has shadowed the legislative one, with
ancient monuments controls exercised at a national level and historic buildings ones by
local government albeit with national involvement through reserve powers and appeal
mechanisms. Again there might have been the scope for convergence with the increasing
involvement of archaeology in the locally administered planning system from the early
1970s onwards. But other factors kept things apart. The two kinds of expertise were
promoted largely separately by DoE and English Heritage in its earlier days, with
archaeological posts in local government perceived as the more difficult to establish, and
more systematically pump-primed. The local government system did not help with its
constant state of piecemeal reorganisation from 1974 onwards: generally, archaeology
pushed for involvement at county level, many being too big for a single post, while
building conservation tended to push at district level, many of whom felt they were too
small to support a post. Comprehensive county teams serving all their districts were held
up as the answer, but these tended to wither under reorganisation-related in-fighting and
many were distinctly un-joined-up as between archaeology and historic buildings.
Moving on to intrinsic differences, there is a need to reconcile the claims of the
particular and of context. Many people are content with their specialisms and do not want
to look much further than them, whether it is pottery or pargetting. We need people who
are expert in the vernacular buildings of an area or Roman marching camps and it is
unreasonable to expect them to take on board a much wider range of knowledge. But we
also need to recognise the inter-connectedness of such elements within the wider historic
environment. There are at least three ways in which this gets expressed. One is
adjacency of interest, the need to be aware that pursuit of one aspect of the historic
environment may affect another – a matter of process. Classic examples include repairs
to the foundations of historic buildings, which can affect archaeological deposits that are
part of the history of the building, and the effects of site management regimes on
ecological interests. Another is nesting of interest, how a concern for the larger elements
of the historic environment, landscape and townscape, cannot be properly followed
without an adequate appreciation of their components, whose understanding may well be
the province of another – a matter of content. Yet another is networking of interest, how
anyone with general responsibilities for an area and all the buildings and / or archaeology
within it must operate on the basis of the formula ‘knowing who to ask is just as
important as knowing the answer oneself’. Surely these are outlooks that we ought to
have in common.
Taking the professions as part of the intrinsic rather than the circumstantial, some
interesting issues emerge. One is competences. IFA and IHBC have to hold a delicate
balance between defining competence in terms of specific subject areas and process
skills, and ensuring that wider professional awareness is not compromised. It is
interesting that IFA, the older Institute, began with a complex set of Areas of
Competence designed to cope with the various different types of archaeologist, and is
now moving towards a more flexible scheme of self-validation and peer review. IHBC,
however, went straight for a broad eight-fold classification of competences, all of which
all members must demonstrate. There is now some convergence towards recognising
individual sets of knowledge and skills within a broad framework.
Another is the relationship of the Institutes to the concept of the historic environment.
The messages here are interestingly mixed. Compare the statements in the current 2002
Year Books of the two organisations. On paper at least, the scope of IHBC’s vision and
requirements is far broader than those of IFA. Yet one of the triggers for this event was a
‘political’ perception that archaeologists were trying to take over the historic
environment. It would interesting for IFA to produce its own mirror version of the IHBC
Year Book statement in order that there could be a proper comparison of how much the
two Institutes have in common at the level of high rhetorical endeavour.
Another aspect is inter-professional relationships. I have a strong impression, not backed
up by any serious research, of different patterns within the two Institutes. There is
relatively little cross-membership of both Institutes. Archaeology seem relatively inturned,
albeit within a fairly large sub-disciplinary circle. Historic Buildings
Conservation in relatively outward-looking, and has significant overlaps with other
cognate main-line professions, mainly represented by the RTPI and RICS. Both Institutes
are young and trying to grow. Both suffer from the inevitable gaps in potential
membership due to the absence of non-joiners not forced to act by membership being an
essential qualification for practice. But IFA probably suffers more from the kind of
fragmentation that allows some segments of the world of archaeology to say that they
cannot or do not want to see what a professional Institute holds for them.
Yet another aspect is professional culture. To put it all in rather an overcrowded nutshell:
there is a view that building conservation is mainly concerned with ensuring good design
and that acceptable development facilitates continuing uses for physically conspicuous
structures and places. Preservation ‘as found’ is part of the process but not the overriding
objective; information as a ‘finder’ has a subservient role. In contrast, archaeology is seen
as mainly concerned with historic elements that have lost economically viable uses and
face threats from decay or development. Systematically stored information is more
important because archaeological elements may be quite difficult to find or recognise; the
lack of options for alternative uses increases the importance of creating and storing an
accessible record when preservation is not possible. What this tends to ignore is what
Kate Clark has put so well in her ‘Informed Conservation’, that understanding
significance includes using archaeological skills and that those skills should be with
others outside the circle of traditional archaeologists.
Conclusion – using the framework
To conclude: all this is as much about contexts for agendas as agendas themselves. The
idea of a framework comprising content, process and users is hardly new, but it is also
bedrock upon which sound structures can be based. Perhaps it is the key instrument for
achieving joined-up-ness. Signing up to it doesn’t involve great declarations – it’s
something the two Institutes could promote as worth discussion and it should certainly be
regarded as an education thing. It is not a Trojan horse of any kind because it is a device
that enables us to identify what we have, and what we do not have, in common, a basis
for celebrating convergence and diversity without worrying excessively about the
territory. There are a few specific suggestions, again largely on underlying matters.
We have got to do something about the misuse of the ‘a’-word - archaeology. It is
causing trouble and confusion. It actually describes an academic discipline, a way of
doing things, the processes involved in recognising, analysing and explaining all the
content of the historic environment, survivals of past material culture, whether now
useless or still useful. There is prehistoric archaeology, landscape archaeology, church
archaeology, industrial archaeology, buildings archaeology, etcetera. If we all do our job
properly by ensuring that as far as possible we understand what we have before we
decide how to preserve, conserve, manage, modify or explain, then we are all doing
something archaeological. So, to put it crudely, there’s no need for historic buildings
people to feel threatened by perceptions of archaeological imperialism over matters such
as buildings analysis – they should be useful colleagues. Anyway, a good conservation
officer has got a lot of archaeologist in him or her.
We must not lose sight of our explanatory role, and of the importance in it of good
information. The interest of the historic environment justifies its conservation and
preservation, and that interest must be conveyed widely. Explaining why should be an
integral part of conserving any useful survival from the past. Making available in one
form or another should be the sine qua non of information collection on any topic.
We should look carefully at the reasons why we do not communicate the interest of our
subject as widely as we might. Some of them are cultural but some are also a matter of
resources and priorities – the lack of resources that keeps people nose-down to reactive
casework until they lose sight of their explanatory role as part of the basic reason for
doing it all in the first place. The minority of incorrigible particularists, who hold to the
heresy that their personal interest in the subject is its own justification need TLC or CPD.
Finally, we must look outside ourselves at the wider world of history within which
aspects of all our activities are set. There is a new level of discussion, connecting
philosophy, practice and audiences and raising both dangers and opportunities in ways
that we neglect at our peril. It is well put by some of the publicity for a debate later this
evening at the National Portrait Gallery, organized by the Institute of Ideas
(www.instituteofideas.com) ‘History with a capital H is being outflanked by particular
and local histories. National history is rejected as an ideological deception, but credence
is given to stories that help ethic communities and other interest groups understand and
define themselves in the present … what is considered heritage has been widened from
historically significant buildings to places, areas or buildings that create a sense of local
belonging and identity-formation. Both English Heritage’s Power of Place and the
DCMS’document look at how the historic environment can be used as a tool in social
inclusion policies. What explains the growing interest in the past ? Is there such a thing
as a universal history that is relevant to us all ? How can history help us understand the
present ? And how valid is the use of history for the purposes of social cohesion ?’
There are others out there: at our peril we fail to influence and join-up in common cause.