Historic England (HE) provides information on good practice for design when making changes to the built historic environment through development.
Historic England writes:
Recent planning reform has placed significant focus on incentivising design quality, in part through a greater role for design coding and design standards. Historic England’s regional presence and statutory role in commenting on planning applications for development give it a powerful influence in encouraging and facilitating new development which is based on an understanding of each site’s unique history, character and context, and thus creating distinctive new neighbourhoods.
Building on past experience with the Building in Context initiative and more recent success of Streets for All, Historic England is well-placed to play a leading role in promoting high-quality design in historic places.
The Places Strategy, published in 2019, describes Historic England’s role in place making and sets out recommendations for developing this role and linked actions. Some of these are related to improving its capacity and capability to promote good-quality design in the historic environment. One change that has already be implemented is that Historic England’s Urban Panel has become the Historic Places Panel. This provides a broad spectrum of independent expertise to help local authorities and others engage in the regeneration and revitalisation of historic places.
The National Planning Policy Framework
Chapter 12 of the National Planning Policy Framework concerns achieving well-designed and beautiful places. This emphasises the importance of setting clear expectations regarding design quality and refers to the role of design policies, design guidance and codes, design review panels, pre-application discussions and workshops, neighbourhood plans and frameworks such as Building for a Healthy Life. Para 135 (c) states that planning policies and decisions should ensure (inter alia) that developments are sympathetic to local character and history, including the surrounding built environment and landscape setting, while not preventing or discouraging appropriate innovation or change (such as increased densities). NPPF paragraph 139 [states] ‘Development that is not well designed should be refused, especially where it fails to reflect local design policies and government guidance on design, taking into account any local design guidance and supplementary planning documents such as design guides and codes’ Chapter 16 ‘Conserving and Enhancing the Historic Environment’ advises that historic environment strategies should take account of the desirability of new development making a positive contribution to local character and distinctiveness.
National Planning Policy Guidance (NPPG) is online guidance which sets out how the government expects the NPPF policies to be applied. It covers design matters in the section on ‘Design: process and tools’. The NPPG endorses the National Design Guide and covers various other matters such as strategic design policies, neighbourhood plans, local design guides, masterplans and design codes.
Design Codes
Design Codes are now increasingly being used in guiding large- and small-scale development schemes. They are defined in the NPPF as ‘A set of illustrated design requirements that provide specific, detailed parameters for the physical development of a site or area. The graphic and written components of the code should build upon a design vision, such as a masterplan or other design and development framework for a site or area.’ The National Model Design Code was issued by MHCLG in January 2021.
Historic England has directly engaged in providing advice on the production of design codes, developing a programme of research in support of emerging design-related policy and guidance. This includes the commissioning of a project from Node aimed at understanding how the historic environment has been reflected in design codes to date, and developing approaches to aid the future creation of design codes for the historic environment.
