6. Caring: Looking after places

This guidance note is for owners and managers of land and places in Cornwall, both rural and urban.

Use, maintenance, and sensitively designed change help keep places alive and active. They can help to appreciate the features and qualities that sustain historic character. They help us develop our senses of place and of identity, whether in the countryside or in town.

In rural areas caring includes retention and traditional maintenance of distinctive infrastructure. This includes field and pasture boundaries, buildings, structures, lanes and yards. It incorporates traditional and distinctive land uses in fields, woods, orchards and pastures. It supports the protection of the intricate and interconnected patterns they form. It also includes appreciating and caring for archaeological sites and features.

Retention, maintenance and use helps preserve the distinctiveness found in urban landscapes. This includes our distinctive city, towns and hamlets. Distinctiveness can be found in the shape, form and scale of streets. Created by alleys, plots, spaces and places in pavements and street furniture. Experienced through the uses made of quarters and zones. From commercial, civic, ecclesiastical, and municipal to residential, recreational and industrial.

Cadsonbury, Callington and Coombe, Kea

Ideal outcomes

• The distinctiveness of Cornwall’s rural and urban places is understood and considered. They retain and regain their interest and diversity through economically viable use. Their management follows or is influenced by historic patterns.
• Skills, technologies and materials required to deliver distinctive land management practices are supported.
• Regeneration of urban places is carefully designed. The design embeds sustainability for the 21st century without losing their distinctive qualities.
• New developments reinforce and respond to local distinctiveness. Building form, detailing, layout and use of buildings and spaces are carefully considered. Developments create places with their own identity while responding to their distinctive context.

Things to consider

• Maintenance of historic places also benefits ecosystems and landscape character and diversity. Many of our richest most resilient ecosystems are in managed landscape. They have long-established land uses. They support diverse wildlife communities. Examples include our Cornish hedges, ancient broadleaf woodlands, marshes, and heaths.
• Materials and styles used in hedges, buildings, and surfacing are locally distinctive. So too are the arrangements of buildings and spaces in farmsteads, hamlets and towns.
• Farming involves knowing and responding to the qualities and potential of land. Placing woods, meadows, and rougher grazing, and arable and pasture in appropriate zones. This practice has reinforced the distinctiveness of Cornwall’s historic landscape. Learning from the past can guide sustainable land management and environmental growth. By incorporating this learning, we strengthen distinctive patterns.
• Towns developed by responding to topography, routeways, functions, and economic and social change. Continued responsiveness will create an urban landscape that fits well in its place.
• Much of Cornwall’s landscape is designated. These include our National Landscapes both Cornwall and Tamar Valley. The Cornwall and West Devon Mining World Heritage Site. Many settlements and urban places receive a degree of protection as Conservation Areas. All are identified in part for their character and distinctiveness.
• Small changes in management can have major beneficial effects. These can include not trimming hedges so close and allowing some hedge trees to grow. In urban settings the retention of historic paving, surfacing or historic shopfronts. In all settings reducing the proliferation of signage.

Approaches and resources

• Enjoy getting to know your land or place, its history and changing use. Understand its fabric, materials and patterns. Use the Assessment Framework and its five themes of Typical Cornish distinctiveness. This will help you think about the many ways it contributes to distinctiveness.
• Seek out experienced local craftspeople to work on features that contribute to distinctiveness. These will include hedgers, masons, etc experienced with local materials.
• The Cornwall and Isles of Scilly HER helps you explore the heritage assets and character of a place. It includes the Cornwall Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC). and some more fine-grained HLCs of parts of Cornwall. They hold characterisations of many towns and industrial settlements. Some of these include some of Cornwall’s Conservation Areas. All will help you find current understanding of the development of places.
• Seek the advice of the Local Planning Authority before applying for heritage consents. Consult with Historic England or I and II* Listed Buildings and Scheduled Monuments
• Changing land use may need planning permission and consent from Natural England. Often this will need an Environmental Impact Assessment.
• Cornwall Council provides more localised guidance alongside specific guidance. These include Cornish farmsteads, non-conformist chapels, and shopfronts in various towns. They also have an extensive library of settlement studies. These provide information on distinctiveness on a more local level.

The following Guidance Notes may also be helpful:

3 Design

5 Looking after Buildings

7 Identifying assets of local significance