Heritage Statement Key Terms
Introduction
This quick guide has been prepared to prepared to guide local authorities and registered providers of social housing in the process of writing a heritage statement.
Contents
Summary
How to use this quick guide?
The guide can be used as a standalone document for prospective applicants or agents, providing an introductory understanding of key terms related to heritage significance and statements. It also acts as a supplementary document for the toolkit titled ‘Writing Heritage Statements’ on the RISE website.
Key Terms
Heritage asset
A building, place, area, or landscape positively identified as having a degree of historic significance that merits consideration in planning decisions. Heritage assets encompass designated assets (as identified in the Historic England register) and non-designated assets (identified by local planning authority during the process of decision-making or plan-making).
Heritage value
The term heritage values refers to the meaning and values that individuals or groups bestow on a heritage asset. The heritage values can be used to unpack and define what is significance about a heritage asset.
Public benefit
Public benefit may derive from various developments and can be anything that delivers economic, social, or environmental objectives as described in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
Public benefits should be of the nature or scale whereby the benefit is experienced by the public, not just privately. However, benefits do not always need to be visible or accessible to the public to be genuine public benefits. For example, works to a listed private dwelling which secures its future as a designated heritage asset could be a public benefit.
Setting
A heritage asset can be significant due to its physical presence, but its setting can also be significant. The setting is defined in the NPPF as the surroundings in which a heritage asset is experienced. Its extent is not fixed and may change as the asset and its surroundings evolve. Elements of a setting may make a positive or negative contribution to the significance of an asset, may affect the ability to appreciate that significance or may be neutral’. The setting will include, but is not limited to, key views of the asset in its wider context.
Significance
This NPPF defines significance as ‘the value of a heritage asset to this and future generations because of its heritage interest’. It defines four types of heritage interest: historic, architectural, artistic, and archaeological. These are explained in detail below:
- Historic: heritage assets can provide an illustrative record of important past lives or events.
- Architectural: the design and visual qualities of an asset, which can arise from either deliberate design or from the evolution of the asset over time.
- Artistic: interest derived from human creative skills, like carving or sculpture.
- Archaeological: where a heritage asset holds, or may potentially hold, evidence of past human activity worthy of conserving or recording for expert investigation.