Using Historic Landscape Characterisation

Introduction
Introduction
The historic
landscape in the
Hodder Valley,
Lancashire
© Lancashire
County Council
Characterisation is an important new
way of managing change in the historic
landscape. Emerging in England and
elsewhere over the past few years, it is
particularly relevant at the landscape
scale. It has distant roots in the 1960s,
in the concept of ‘character’ articulated
in the 1967 Conservation Area
legislation, while more recent influences
include Landscape Character
Assessment and the English Heritage
Historic Landscape Project of 1992-4
(summarised in Yesterday’s World,
Tomorrow’s Landscape, Fairclough et al,
1999). In 1998 characterisation, by then
endorsed by PPG7 and PPG15, was
brought to the foreground by the joint
Countryside Commission/English
Heritage/English Nature project that
produced the Countryside Character
Map. It is also visible in the principles of
works such as Roberts and Wrathmell’s
Settlement Atlas of 2000. Finally it is a
primary vehicle for achieving the goals
and aspirations of the European
Landscape Convention.
Initiatives such as this made the leap
from the confines of selected special
areas or sites, to the bigger picture of
the historic environment as a whole,
whether nationally or at the scale of a
complete county or a town. They
formed part of a general move towards
more integrated and holistic modes of
management and understanding, which
paved the way for the Historic
Landscape Characterisation (HLC)
programme.
Historic Landscape Characterisation
was pioneered in Cornwall in 1994, and
has developed rapidly and broadly into a
major national programme that is now
more than half complete. Its evolution is
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