LONDON, ENGLAND.- Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, announced what English Heritage will be doing over the next five years to make a real difference to England’s historic environment and to address its most urgent needs.

Simon Thurley said: “Our most important priority is to transform the image of heritage conservation. Despite huge strides made over the last few years we are still too often perceived as people against change and against progress. This perception is fed by a small percentage of cases where we either get it wrong, or we fail to explain ourselves clearly. The result is a confrontational system where there seems to be a stark choice between conservation and development and where it is harder to get a result that actually enhances and improves this country thereby preserving our heritage and improving people’s quality of life.

“While not lessening current levels of protection, we need a new code of constructive conservation based on respect, understanding and consent. This will be more powerful than one that is perceived as arbitrary and opaque. Nature conservation has done this brilliantly. It is our turn to do the same.”

He continued: “The key elements needed for this transformation form the centrepiece of our plan for the next five years. The legal framework, the Heritage Protection Review, is top of the list and we will continue to work closely with the Government on this. We are also advising on a raft of reforms in the planning system, the unification of consent regimes and a new Government Planning Policy Statement for the historic environment. Underpinning these English Heritage will be publishing a new suite of conservation principles to attempt to guarantee more consistent and explicable decision making in historic environment cases.

“In turn these measures will be underpinned by an extension of our Historic Environment Local Management (HELM) training scheme for local authorities, by our drive to sign up Historic Environment Champions in every council in England, and by our close co-operation with the rest of the heritage sector.”

Simon Thurley said: “Thousands of Victorian and Edwardian schools, hospitals, libraries, town halls, courts, police stations and churches are deemed to be no longer suitable for their original use. This is one of the biggest historic buildings’ crises since the reformation and an enormous challenge both in terms of our philosophy of conservation (what will be acceptable change) and in terms of finding new uses.

“We will be creating for the first time a comprehensive “At Risk” register to include all buildings, monuments and landscapes at all grades that are at risk. And we will be revising our grant schemes together with our partners the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Regional Development Agencies and others to be better placed to deal with the problems that this reveals. Our priority will be to try and prevent these structures becoming at risk rather than waiting to clear up the mess later.

“As an increasing number of under-used church buildings face redundancy, English Heritage will be launching a series of initiatives to address the challenges faced by all denominations of the church. We will be continuing for the next few years our joint grant scheme for repairs with the Heritage Lottery Fund, but we will also be establishing conservation officers for vulnerable churches, generating discussion on the options for the future of church buildings (such as internal re-ordering to allow a variety of community uses alongside worship), and publishing detailed guidance on efficient ways to convert churches.

“Later this year we will be carrying out a new Church Needs Survey with the Church of England. The results, to be launched in Spring 2006, will be compared with those from a 1994 survey allowing everyone to see what has happened to the buildings in the last 10 years and helping us to identify the priorities for future spending. Together with our partners we need to help place our parish churches back in the centre of their communities.

“Another major challenge is the future of our countryside, which is being fiercely debated in the face of climate change, agricultural restructuring, globalisation and the pressures of an increasing population. Change of use is an enormous issue for rural as well as urban historic buildings, not least the 70,000 listed traditional farmsteads which are now increasingly functionally redundant. But the countryside also faces pressures from suburban creep, from the loss of character or “cloning” in market towns and from the impacts of agricultural intensification on archaeological sites and historic parkland.

“Despite this, we believe there is everything to play for. With our partner environmental organisations - particularly the new integrated agency, Natural England – we will continue to ensure that Government recognises that heritage, landscape and nature are an indivisible and indispensable public good. Together we will continue to press the case for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, and work to ensure that incentives for these farmers, such as those provided by the new Environmental Stewardship scheme, are directed to the historic places most in need of protection, particularly the thousands of nationally important archaeological sites still being actively damaged by ploughing. We are pump priming 15 countryside archaeology posts in local authorities to help this happen.”

Dr Thurley also set out English Heritage’s priorities for investing in its own estate. “We are the owners of last resort. We step in and take sites and monuments into our own care when there is no other solution and we look after the residual buildings from the historic Office of Works. In two cases recently we have purchased (with the help of partners) major historic buildings at risk, Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire and Ditherington Flax Mill in Shrewsbury. Our preferred option for these will be to repair them and put them back into the market, ideally with public access guaranteed for the future. In other cases such as the archaeological site at Groundwell Ridge we have bought the site and found a suitable owner and manager to protect it.

“The government, recognising its responsibility for the sites that we care for on behalf of the nation, has made available £9 million to bring a group of our guardianship sites back up to standard. We will be investing in Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, in Chiswick House, south-west London, and in Audley End House in Essex. We will also continue to use our properties to inform our advice and statutory work in matters such as disabled access, health and safety and building conservation.”

Simon Thurley concluded: “Our aim over the next five years is to help improve the way people understand, value, care for, and enjoy their heritage. At heart we want to improve the quality of life of everyone. This is not wishy washy politically correct stuff, this is about guaranteeing the future of the past, it is about making the past part of our future. This is why we exist.”

English Heritage has also published details of 22 national projects on which it will be working between now and the end of the year.