Andrew Saint of English Heritage draws attention to the threat to 19th and 20th century planned housing. THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATION AREAS Every conservation officer is up against the dilemma that listed building legislation has teeth but conservation area legislation doesn't. Sometimes inordinate fuss seems to be made about some tiny detail of internal joinery or paint colour in a listed building, while down the road a whole district of public architectural value is being eroded before one's eyes. Windows are changed, chimneys are lopped, Magnet joinery is installed and brickwork and stonework painted; now, in a new form of unsightliness, satellite dishes are starting to obtrude. These things happen in almost all conservation areas, either because the local council doesn't have the powers to do anything or, if it does, because it doesn't want to appear heavy-handed or doesn't have the manpower or the genuine interest in conservation to take effective action. The problem is specially acute - and getting worse - for areas of Victorian CONTEXT24 and 20th-century planned housing. This was a field in which Britain had, and has, the highest possible international reputation. From the time of industrial settlements like New Lanark and Saltaire through the projects of the Garden City Movement to the post-:war New Towns and housing estates, people flocked to Britain to admire the humanity and good taste with which we housed our working classes. With few exceptions the quality of these pioneering developments is now being compromised, although many such estates are conservation areas in whole or in part. The reasons are twofold. First, their value and importance are not popularly recognised. They are not in the centres of historic or picturesque towns, they do not attract tourists, their residents are not usually well-off or articulate and there is usually nothing specially grand about them. It is hard to convey to tenants and councillors why they Totterdown Fields Estate: the first municipal Cottage Estate in Britain. should be conserved and maintained as an architectural whole and why little details about their treatment matter so much. Secondly, estates of this kind have fallen prey to the physical consequences of 1980s-style housing policies, namely crude "package improvements" on the one hand and whimsical "privatisation" on the other. On some suburban estates which once boasted subtle stylistic homogeneity, one now beholds the crushing contrast of easyto-maintain plastics window frames on the houses still in municipal ownership, interspersed here and there with the stone-cladding, fake halftimbering and leaded lights which distinguish the proud new homeowner from those who still pay rent. In London, the gravity of what was happening was recognised years ago. In 1981-82 the GLC Historic Build21
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