1. Significance and Planning Applications
Before you start to assess a planning application , let alone before start to write the comment letter, it’s important to understand the Significance of a site, so we’re going to look at this now.
Historic Landscape Project

2. Historic Landscape Project
Conservation defined
“the process of maintaining and managing change to a heritage asset in a way that sustains and where appropriate enhances its significance” Historic England
Let’s start by getting back to basics . You can see that Significance stars in HE’s definition of conservation.
Clearly, significance is key here – not preserving asset’s physicality exactly as is, is more sophisticated than that, is about protecting what’s special.
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3. Historic Landscape Project
National Planning Policy Framework
NPPF 127 – ’require an applicant to describe the significance of any heritage assets affected, including any contribution made by their setting’
NPPF 129 – ‘identify and assess the particular significance of any heritage asset that may be affected by a proposal (including by development affecting setting of a heritage asset)’
NPPF 133 – ‘Where a proposed development will lead to substantial harm to or total loss of significance of a designated heritage asset, local planning authorities should refuse consent’
NPPF 135 – ‘The effect of an application on the significance of a non-designated heritage asset should be taken into account in determining the application.’
Significance runs through the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) - a policy from the Department of Communities and Local Government to guide local authority planning decisions.
Significance crops up the whole way through the heritage section of the NPPF, and here are a few of my favourites:
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NPPF 127 – lpas ’require an applicant to describe the significance of any heritage assets affected, including any contribution made by their setting’
By the way, it goes onto say that the level of detail required in describing significance should be proportionate to the asset’s importance and no more than is necessary – this reminds us to make a mental note to keep Statements of Significance concise!
NPPF 129 – lpas should ‘identify and assess the particular significance of any heritage asset that may be affected by a proposal (including by development affecting setting of a heritage asset)’
And a very exciting one - NPPF 133 – ‘Where a proposed development will lead to substantial harm to or total loss of significance of a designated heritage asset, local planning authorities should refuse consent’ – hurrah, significance is SO important in conservation terms that harm to significance can in itself lead to refusal of consent (although there are lots of caveats attached to this about loss of significance being outweighed by public benefit).
Even this emphasis on significance even extends to non-designated assets, so NPPF 135 says – ‘The effect of an application on the significance of a non-designated heritage asset should be taken into account in determining the application.’ Of course, this is so relevant for CGTs.
Historic Landscape Project
Historic Landscape Project

4. Significance in your comment letter
Describe the significance of the site (the listing entry may include a Statement of Significance, or ask your researchers if they are working on one)
Assess and describe the impact of the proposal in terms of its effect on the site’s significance
So, we can extrapolate from those NPPF extracts that we need to be aware of the Significance of a site for two reasons when looking at planning applications:
So we can make sure that lpas understand the significance of a site (btw this is the main reason that we keep banging on to CGTs about writing Statements of Significance and getting them into the HER, as this is where lpas primarily look when trying to find pre-prepared information on the significance of a site)
So we can make sure that our assessment of a proposal is in terms of its impact on the site’s significance (ie NPPF compatible), and explain it in these terms to the lpa too.
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5. So how do you know what the Significance of a site is?
So, how do you know what the Significance of a site is? In an ideal world, the applicant would have produced an excellent Statement of Significance that you have absolute faith in using as the basis of your assessment of impact. More realistically, someone will have produced one in the past and this will be on the county’s Historic Environment Record (a local authority held online and publicly accessible resource pooling historic records for a site together). Quite possibly, it would have actually been your CGT’s researchers who put the SoS into the HER. Quite possibly also, if your site is on a local list or even the National List (one of the more recent additions), this entry might include a SoS.
Unfortunately though, Statements of Significance are still a relatively new concept and so ‘we’ are all still scrambling to provide them. Most likely is that no decent SoS exists for your site yet. Don’t panic – first thing to do is to contact your CGTs’ researchers and see if they can help, either with one that they have up their sleeve, or by helping you to determine the site’s significance for yourself.
A likely scenario is that you may end up having to do a bit of research and drafting of a Statement of Significance yourself. This will have to be a quick and dirty job as the planning system clock will be ticking, so try not to panic and just get on with it.
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6. Significance: Heritage Values
Has ruins and archaeology of 15th century mansion, which can reveal more about medieval fortified houses. Also has good archives, recorded in Grimm’s views, and in Brown account books so there is the ability to learn more if these are coupled with site assessments.
Minimal
Evidential Value
Communal or Community Based Value
The significance of … lies chiefly in …
…the way in which the 18th century Capability Brown parkland uses a blend of openness, views, and tree plantings to create an archetypal 18th century landscape using the medieval ruins of Cowdray House, about which there is still more to be understood, for dramatic effect.
Undulating 16th and 18th century open parkland with panoramic views, particularly over the South Downs, is framed by wooded slopes to the south west, contrasted with 19th century formal and woodland gardens, and given dramatic focus by the ruins of medieval Cowdray House.
Demonstrates Capability Brown’s work, and the way medieval buildings were often incorporated as ornamental features within the open views of 18th century and later parkland.
Today, we’re going to need to understand Cowdray’s Significance in order to assess the proposal and then articulate it in the letter. I’ll quickly whizz through what would normally be our full day Significance training to give you an idea of how to determine Significance (more guidance is available on the Resource Hub at and we’ll end up with a SoS (a very rough one!). By the way, here we are using HE definitions of Heritage Values, whereas NPPF uses slightly different words, although the concepts are the same. HE = Evidential, Communal, Aesthetic, Historic, NPPF = NPPF headings instead (archaeological, architectural, aesthetic, historic). This is one of those things where you have to choose one… but basic concept is the same.
Evidential value relates to the potential of a place to reveal new information – what archaeological potential does a place have, for example?
Archaeology, archives – many heritage assets still hold hitherto unrealised evidence – they have evidential value
Communal value derives from all the other meanings that people assign to a place. It is not the same as Community or being communally accessible (nb Buckingham Palace)! Often expressed in a sense of belonging and can have a profound effect on local identity, and it is here that we touch on intangible and living heritage.
Historical value lies in the potential to tell stories about the past, or evoke a sense of what it might have been like to live in the past – using the site as a key to unlock a narrative.
Historical value tends to be illustrative or associative.
Associative value arises from association with a notable person, event, or movement because being at the place where something momentous happened can increase understanding of it. Many buildings and landscapes are associated with people, literature, art, music or film, for example. (So Petworth has Associative Value in its connection with Turner. JMW Turner benefited from the patronage of the 3rd Earl of Egremont who gave him a studio at Petworth House. The artist visited Petworth regularly until the Earl’s death in 1837 and produced 1,000 drawings to record the beauty of the place. Therefore, Petworth is a really useful key in unlocking the story of Turner.)
We can probably all think of landscapes that we can connect to a historically important figure, including designers, so Associative Historical Value is a biggy for historic landscapes.
Illustrative value has the power to demonstrate some historical point, to narrate an historical story or to evoke the past. (A William Kent gateway on the edge of a cricket pitch at a school in Surrey, the site of the ferme ornee of Philip Southcote, Woburn Farm. It illustrates the former use and design of the estate, being a relatively rare survivor of this passing but influential trend, and so more broadly illustrates the use of ornamentation in the farm landscape of the 18th century, as well as being an authentic example of the work of Kent. )
They can be the result of the conscious design, primarily the qualities generated by the design of a building, park or garden.
Aesthetic value arises from the sensory and intellectual interest of a place.
Perhaps you might describe the aesthetic value of a parkland landscape as the arrangement of large mature trees planted to reveal and frame views under their broad canopies. Aesthetic value can also be the apparently fortuitous outcome of the way in which a place has evolved and been used over time, ie without design. For example, the seemingly organic form of an urban landscape - dramatic quality in the juxtaposition of buildings and spaces.
And particularly in landscapes, the designed and fortuitous can be used to work together – design being used to emphasise the fortuitous nature of surrounding landscape (in other words, a designed park or garden can be planned to work beautifully within its fortuitous wider setting) .
Consider each of these points in relation to your site, perhaps making notes in these boxes, and then edit the notes into a coherent paragraph (or a few), which can then go in the middle and be your SoS.
Aesthetic Value
Historic Value
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7. A tool to help Feature Evidential Historical Aesthetic Communal
Fieldtree Park
Northern Park
Lake
Temple
Kitchen Garden
View to tower
By the way, you are allowed to use different tools when writing your SoS! Sometimes we recommend this one, which allows you to make different statements for different parts of the site.
Historic Landscape Project

8. Historic Landscape Project
@leapthehaha
So there we’ve got our understanding of the Signficance of Cowdray (btw, I’m sure most people could do much better than that – I have just cobbled something together from the designation descriptions for the sake of today’s exercise), which we can take forward into our work assessing the impact of development , and then into articulating the impact for planners.
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