C O N T E X T 1 3 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 4 19 VALUING HERITAGE are failing our communities has become so endemic that rather than focusing on the protection and celebration of historically-significant landscapes, local authorities often presume the only viable strategy to ensure a site’s future is to compromise its historical integrity. To add insult to injury, public opinion is often invoked as a rationale for redevelopment. The consequences of underfunding and failed management strategies are commonly misinterpreted and/or misrepresented as evidence that communities do not value their green spaces, while in fact they are simply frustrated by their poor condition. Where is the heritage sector’s response to this disregard of our historic public green space? Perhaps one reason for the inadequacy of our collective response has been a traditional ambivalence to the landscapes concerned. In Britain, the most significant contribution to the canon of urban green space was made in the latter half of the 19th century. Consequently, a large number of urban parks are Victorian, a period dismissed by the heritage community for much of the twentieth century. It was not until the late 1980s that a consensus emerged regarding the status of public parks as heritage landscapes. Yet despite this historical lag, it should now be possible for the profession to make a persuasive and consistent defence of historic public parks. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening. Ironically, efforts to conform to endlessly changing governmental and funding structures have seen academics and heritage professionals alike collude passively in the fragmentation of the sector and even the dissolution of the verbal, economic and governmental tools we might use to defend it. It is essential that we regain control of these tools and apply them effectively if we are to defend the hard-won ground gained prior to 2007. In early 2014, English Heritage will publish the National Review of Research Priorities for Urban Parks, Designed Landscapes and Open Spaces. Completed over the course of 12 months, the study identifies myriad problems in the range and depth of knowledge, funding strategies, and mechanisms for recording and improving the condition of historic urban parks. The report identified a number of chronic weaknesses in the sector, perhaps most worryingly at the basic level of identification, quantification and direction. There is little doubt that perceptions of historic parks and their significance are informed by the semantics of their description and categorisation. Nevertheless, at present, the typologies applied to historic green spaces are frequently inaccurate, inconsistent and even contradictory. Broad terms such as ‘Victorian park’ suggest a commonality among sites defined purely by the date of their design, without any acknowledgement of their social or architectural distinctiveness. More worrying still is that even these most simplistic terms are being obfuscated by those who seek to present historic parks as mere components of a wider canon of generic ‘green space’. The move away from specific typologies towards blanket terms is evident in the current enthusiasm for collectivising a town or city’s green spaces as one single resource, rather than as a collection of distinctive and sometimes antithetical landscapes. The manner in which different green spaces relate to one another within the broader urban landscape has long been Ensuring the protection of newly-restored historic features can lead to some unpopular additions. Many of the amenities added to parks in the latter half of the 20th century are no longer fit for purpose and actually deter visitors.
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