and as well as repair and restoration, removal and re-erection would entail substantial replacement. New timbers would place different stresses on the new structure and care needed to be taken about the way in which the structure was moved. Even though a timber framed structure could therefore be erected on a greenfield site, perhaps more than any other, its status ought to be re-assessed. The owners of the building had recognised the problem of its location some time ago and it was public knowledge that they were prepared to let a third party remove it to another site. The District Council was generally supportive but wished to see it retained within the local area if at all possible. Over the years, there were more than a dozen potential takers of va1ying degrees of seriousness. Some of these proposed to move the building to a nearby site where timber framing was the vernacular building type. Others suggested sites many miles away in, for example, gritstone or sandstone areas. None of the approaches properly understood the problems involved in moving a timber framed building, nor did they have the finance and professional skills necessary to do the job properly. Most I suspect simply thought that it would make a very attractive and marketable period house. Eventually the penny dropped and they all faded away; in all cases, there was clear financial shortfall. The simple removal and reerection by a third party of a domestic scale listed building is not therefore a general solution to the problem. There are two approaches which could make up the shortfall in the cost of carrying out the removal of a listed building. Very occasionally buildings are moved as what might be described as a labour of love by an individual (I know of one example where this has happened) or by an organisation such as a Building Preservation Trust. It has to be said, however, that many, perhaps most, building preservation trusts could not handle this type of task. The alternative, which needs to be given careful thought, is for the owner and the local authority between them to take a proactive approach to the removal and re-erection of the building. There are a number of ways in which this can be done depending particularly on the status of the owner and the attitude of the authority. There are a number of interacting factors. A corporate organisation will generally have more scope than a private individual to broker a removal and rebuilding. It may, for example, be able to provide the site, or some of the workforce necessaty. Most important of course is the finance. The owner has to assess the long term costs of the status quo. Keeping a listed building safe and secure is not expensive at any one point in time but it is permanent and ongoing. In addition at some stage, a response may be necessa1y to possible enforcement action. The authority, for its part, has to bear in mind that generally consent for demolition is more likely to be granted in this type of situation. Standing aloof, being selfrighteous and blaming everybody else if this should occur or if the building falls clown is non-productive. As far as the building is concerned, removal to a new site may well be the 'last chance GreenFlagParkAwards Alan Taylor was invited to be a judge on behalf of IHBC in the Country's first Green Flag Park Award Scheme. Here he explains the background to the scheme and gives details of the first year's award winners. The last five years have seen a resurgence of interest in urban parks. Hazel Conway's book People's Parks published in 1992 was the first serious study of the great 19th century municipal parks (many readers will remember her contribution to the 1992 ACO Annual School at Keele). The Garden History Society and the Victorian Society jointly publisheclPublicProspectsContext 56 December 1997 Historic Urban Parks under Tbreat in 1993, the same year as the GMB union procluceclGroundsforConcem, a campaign to save our parks, gardens and open spaces. Both documented the decline of municipal parks in the face of CCT, budgetary cutbacks, and vandalism. All three publications, and a later report in 1995 from the think tank Comeclia/Demos Park Life: Urban saloon'. There are rogues who are only interested in getting rid of a listed building, but not as many as some may believe. Owners may be open to persuasion that the accumulating cost of ongoing maintenance or the expense of building up a case for demolition could be better spent on a solution which would give the building a meaningful future in a different location. Conclusion There are a significant number of listed buildings, often in poor condition, whose setting has deteriorated drastically since they were built. As far as appreciation and understanding of their intrinsic merit is concerned, they may be quite meaningless and have no realistic long term future. Many of these buildings are at risk and will remain so until eventually, by some process or other, they are lost. There is no advice for situations of this type Demolition may be the right solution in some cases but in many it will not. Taking 'wind and watertight' enforcement action is at best a short term palliative and in the long term may well be money wasted which could have been better spent. Moving a listed building is not and should not be a regular occurrence but there are situations where it represents the only realistic future for the building. Conservation is, or should be, a proactive function which can quickly identify those situations where removal and rebuilding is the most effective solution for a building and sets up the necessa1y creative action by both authority and owner which breaks the spiral of decline and enables it to take place. Parks and Social Renewal highlighted the value of these sites as part of our cultural inheritance, an integral part of the urban fabric, an ecological green lung, as well as a place for popular recreation. The catalytic effect of these reports can most clearly be seen in the Heritage Lottery Fund's first special themed project, the Urban Parks Programme. This has already channelled 45
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