The remit of English Heritage, the quango that advises the government on the built environment, is clear: “to protect and promote England’s spectacular historic environment and ensure that its past is researched and understood”. In reality, this has often been translated into a far simpler mantra — “minimising change”.

There are signs that a large-scale rethink is underway, however. To the consternation of some more traditionally-minded members of Britain’s conservation establishment, the organisation has signalled it is about to take a far more flexible stance towards the renovation of historic buildings. Far from being preserved in aspic, it argues, they should be allowed to evolve into the kind of place you and I could actually live in.

This new thinking is set out on the organisation’s website (www. english-heritage.org.uk ), which also gives you the chance to add your own comments by May 11. (Or you can read our condensed version below.)

To take a look at what it means in practice, look no further than Hellifield Peel - the subject of a special Grand Designs episode. The building is a former medieval defensive tower seven miles from Skipton, Yorkshire, built in the 1330s to protect villagers from northern raiding parties. Last occupied in the 1940s, it was a ruin until Francis and Karen Shaw came on the scene. Francis, who remembered the place from teenage holidays, had always hankered after buying a tower. But there are not many of them around: Hellifield Peel is one of only six in Yorkshire. He and Karen spotted it on English Heritage’s Buildings At Risk Register and bought it for £100,000. They then spent £50,000 getting utilities and a drive installed, before applying in 2004 to rebuild it, reroof it and live in it.

This was not easy, given that it was a scheduled ancient monument. As such, it was subject to all kinds of stringent conditions — such as archeological surveys that, in the Shaws’ case, produced one land drain and a plastic plate at a cost of £25,000. As Karen, 40, says: “We’ve had quite a few hurdles to jump with English Heritage and the archeology. Sometimes it feels as though we don’t own our own property.”

Then again, very few people attempt to work on scheduled ancient monuments. Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage, cannot recall another example of anyone converting one into a home — which makes Hellifield Peel a first.

The chances are that a decade ago, the Shaws would have been refused permissions and told to stabilise the ruin, conserve it and leave it basically as they found it. Result: a charming ivy-clad ruin for locals to walk past. But Keith Emerick, English
Heritage’s local senior officer (and part architect of the draft conservation principles) took a far more pragmatic approach.

“It was quite simple,” says Francis, 43. “Given another 10 or 20 years this place wasn’t going to be here. This is its last chance and English Heritage has been very supportive — providing me with a lot of information, drawings and photographs. So it is very keen to see the building saved.” Emerick’s view was there was no need to preserve the place as a ruin. It was structurally dangerous and had no association with any important historical event. So why not rebuild it, making informed guesses as to how it might have once looked?

The result is a pretty fair success, as you can judge in a Grand Designs special about the peel on Channel 4 on Wednesday, at 9pm. We filmed the entire three years of the Shaws’ project, which cost them £750,000.

The finished building, which has been valued at just under £2m, is a seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom home for the Shaws and their two young daughters that is a sensitive mix of traditional conservation techniques, preservation and careful restoration.

Inside, though, there is also a lot of dramatic reconstruction: new carved stone doorways and fireplaces, all designed by Francis, an architect with Leeds firm Brewster Bye, are in a style best described as “20th-century retro-castle”, as though the work of Edwin Lutyens, the eminent Edwardian architect. Everyone, including Emerick, breathed a sigh of relief at the results. We were all dreading it would turn out more like 20th-century Disney castle.

“It’s about keeping it simple, but not too simple,” says Francis. “If you go totally against the spirit of authenticity in a place like this, you end up with a plain ceiling, plain walls, no fireplace. You end up with a modern box inside an old building. What we are doing here is approaching not just the repairs but the whole structure, and all the new work in a very traditional manner.”

This acceptance of reconstruction, new beams and carved stonework in traditional rather than contemporary style is not commonly allowed in a standard Grade II-listed house, let alone in a scheduled ancient monument. The peel marks a turning away from a philosophy of “conservative repair” to something more pragmatic and flexible.

English Heritage may be happy with the results, but what about those other guardians of our historic buildings such as the Georgian Group, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Victorian Society and the Twentieth Century Society?

Surprisingly, perhaps, they all seem quite keen — and that includes the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, a particularly venerable body (of which I am a member) that has stood during its 125 years of existence for an almost archeological approach to conservation: where change to a building or place is minimised; where additions and alterations — if allowed at all — are reversible; and where the layers of a building’s history can all be read, like a good book, to be of their time.

In fact, it turns out that the socitety was instrumental in the consultation about plans for the peel and generally very supportive of the Shaws’ ideas. In its mainly positive report, the organisation suggested the real problem was the lack of conservation experience within Craven district council, which, in common with 30% of local authorities, does not have a conservation officer.

The front line here — as elsewhere in Britain — will be in planning departments. The battle will be to win the hearts and minds of planners and conservation officers — and train conservation officers in the first place. Effete discussions over whether to restore, preserve or conservatively repair are fairly irrelevant if your planning department has a junior planner fresh out of school looking after its historic buildings.

Judging by your letters, the most frustrating encounters you have with local authorities involve conservation officers — or hapless planners trying to deal with old buildings. That is because existing conservation policy is woolly and open to all kinds of personal interpretation: what you do to your listed home often ends up subject to the whims and opinions of one person. They can — sometimes, it seems, arbitrarily — determine or even damage the quality of your life by preventing change. That’s the price you pay for living in an old house. So there.

Which is why English Heritage’s new ideas, which it calls its draft conservation principles, aim to provide a clear frameworkto assess the value of our historic built environment. They also put people and their enjoyment at the centre of things. With luck, that will eventually mean an end to poor-quality, negative decisions from local councils that don’t invest in conservation. It should also mean we won’t see a rash of comedy castles across the countryside.

With care, our landscape will be a richer, more diverse, place where buildings are restored, rebuilt or sometimes just repaired and left. Because people don’t thrive on dogma or negativity. They thrive on diversity.

kevin.mccloud@sunday-times.co.uk

English Heritage proposals

— Change in the historic environment is inevitable, whether caused by natural processes, through use, or by people responding to social, economic and technological advances

— Places must remain authentic, embodying the “heritage values” attached to them. This means defining what matters about a place and building on that, making changes if need be to add authenticity

— Intervention that causes limited harm to the values of a place may be justified if it increases understanding of the past, reveals or reinforces particular heritage values, or is necessary to sustain those values for future generations. This means, in the right circumstances, that you can change a historic building

— Changes to a building or structure should be capable of being reversed, in order not unduly to prejudice options for future generations

— Equally, places should not be rendered incapable of a sustainable use because of a reluctance to make modest but irreversible changes. Except that when we want buildings to be accessible and sustainable, which is everywhere these days, there might well be an argument for irreversible changes

Grand Designs, Wednesday February 28 at 9pm on Channel 4, followed by Grand Designs: Trade Secrets on More4.

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