Conservation Plans

Conservation Plans are invaluable for owners of heritage sites or buildings to really understand what they have and enable informed choices about those buildings.

Building Conservation Plans are first of all statements that define the importance and cultural significance of a building. They allow our clients to make informed decisions about the future of their cultural assets. When providing full architectural services for works to a historic building or site we prepare these documents or the conservation statement. We can also prepare them in the role of Conservation Advisor, to assist design teams if we are not the principle architect.

The process of creating them requires research and investigations in order to form a proper understanding of the building. Essentially, they are a tool in the intellectual process of managing change, a means of allowing the building to speak for itself and reveal to us an appropriate solution. The process is about establishing what is important about a particular building or site and why it is important. It will involve recording the important elements and an explanation of the context in which they exist. 

For owners of heritage sites or buildings, these plans are invaluable as it is vitally important to really understand what they have. They enable informed decision making about allocation of resources. For those simply engaged in conserving what is there, they help with deciding a hierarchy of priorities. For developers, they are used as a tool to justify any change that is proposed in submissions for planning permission and listed building consent. Where applications for funding are being prepared to the Heritage Lottery Fund and other grant funding bodies on substantial projects a conservation plan is now expected.

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