English Heritage recently recommended that people visit their Guide to Heritage Protection. It’s certainly worthwhile and it got us thinking about what our primary concern, conservation, actually means. If you look in the dictionary it means “careful preservation and protection of something” which would be fine applied to heritage sites but the trouble is a different version applies to those.
EH quote three definitions and they have clearly changed over time. The earliest one [ICOMOS 1994] was fine, much like the dictionary. It said Conservation comprised efforts to ensure the material safeguard of heritage assets. But by 2008 [Conservation Principles, English Heritage] it was no longer just about safeguarding, it was a process that seemed to presuppose that change might happen to the site and would need managing. It was “the process of managing change to a significant place in its setting in ways that will best sustain its heritage values”. And now in 2012 under the definition in the National Planning Policy Framework, change is no longer to be merely “managed” in a reactive way but is also to be maintained in an almost proactive way. Conservation currently is “the process of maintaining and managing change to a heritage asset”.
It would be naïve to expect conservation of heritage sites to mean no change to them. Not all windfarms and housing developments near heritage sites can be cancelled. On the other hand, bearing in mind all the political breezes currently blowing, a Planning Framework that specifies the act of conservation of a heritage site comprises maintaining and managing change sounds as if it is taking sides – and not with those who value them!
The Heritage Journal 
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27/09/2012 at 22:01
calmgrove
Conservation as ‘the process of maintaining and managing change to a heritage asset’? What political overtones such an otherwise innocent definition carries, especially in the light of its continued rephrasing over time.
First, it’s ambiguous phrasing. Does it consist of two parts, the ‘process of maintaining a heritage asset’ plus ‘the process of managing change’ to said asset? Many of us would support maintaining a heritage asset, wouldn’t we? And if ‘managing change’ was the corollary (time of course ravages us all) than that would be fine too.
But the way the phrase stands suggests that it means something rather different: it could mean instead that change (whether caused by time or by human agency) is something to be both maintained and managed. In such politcal charged times as ours I worry that human agency (in the form of the loosening of planning red tape to allow unfettered development) will threaten heritage assets, in fact is expected to continue to threaten heritage assets in such a way that change will have to be ‘managed’ (in other words, total excavation and/or destruction of archaeological contexts) prior to development.
It may be a cynical interpretation, but we have all come across enough philistine approaches to heritage to suspect the worst.
28/09/2012 at 06:20
heritageaction
I confess, I assumed that “maintaining and managing” both related to change but you are right, it could equally mean something less disturbing – maintaining a heritage asset and managing change. So at best it’s merely an unfortunate ambiguity – and one that’s normally missing from parliamentary drafting. But at worst it’s a deliberate development-aid. Had it appeared in a conservation document it would be easy to think it was innocuous but as it’s in a national planning policy framework it’s less easy to see why maintaining a heritage asset would be mentioned as a planning issue at all, especially as there was already a perfectly good official definition of conservation in existence that didn’t mention it – so the suspicion arises that the intention was for maintaining to relate to change. It will be interesting to see how Inspectors see it – or the Secretary of State!
28/09/2012 at 21:23
calmgrove
Perhaps the Priddy farmer was maintaining and managing change to the Priddy Circles: making sure change happened and managing to effect change by destroying part of a ‘heritage asset’. (A horrible term, this, seeing what remains of the past as something to be packaged up as something of monetary value, like the family silver, rather than of instrinsic but priceless worth).