Harmony in the landscape

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Unless the bigger policy context is supportive, the good work done by lottery funding is at best inadequate and at worst an exercise in damage limitation, says HLF board member Chris Baines

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Each year more than a quarter of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s £300m budget is being allocated to landscape and natural heritage projects. This is already making an enormous difference to the output of successful applicants such as conservation NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and local councils, but is the money paying for preservation, or is it driving a dynamic agenda for landscape change?

Green light for urban greenspace
The Urban Parks programme is one of HLF’s most popular areas of activity. Although the UK invented the public park and spread the concept all around the world, our own remarkable legacy has suffered serious neglect for more than 50 years. Many urban parks have become dilapidated and we have lost some of the management skills they need. The HLF has so far committed £250m to local councils and their partners. About 200 public parks are benefiting, and all over the country boating lakes, conservatories, rose gardens, bowling greens, pets’ corners and plant collections are being skilfully revived. In Birkenhead, for instance, the public park designed by Thomas Paxton which inspired the much more famous Central Park, New York, is returning to its former glory. Many of the HLF grants for urban parks call for employment of a dedicated park-keeper and this in itself is helping to reverse the decades of decline.

The lottery millions are beginning to have a collective impact way beyond the boundary railings. The original 19th-century motivations for municipal greenspace – cleaner air and access to healthy exercise – are being valued once more. In the best examples restored parks are re-establishing creative links with local people, rekindling craft skills, increasing the public’s access to natural beauty and to stimulating recreation, and greatly enhancing the quality of life for those who live and work in the near neighbourhood. Renewed pride in public parks is being reinforced through the Green Flag Awards for excellence, whilst the Urban Parks Forum and the Urban Greenspace Taskforce – both post-Lottery initiatives – are arguing that government at both national and locallevel should place our public parks once more right at the heart of the liveability agenda. If they succeed, the £250m of lottery money will have been well spent, but recent estimates suggest an urgent need to spend at least £2bn more, if even half of the nation’s long-neglected parks are to be brought up to scratch. With so much proven popularity, should we expect the lottery to keep on paying such a lion’s share of funding? Better parks increase the healthiness of urban living. Surely it is time they benefited from the National Health Service’s declared intention to pursue preventive healthcare policies? They help to deliver UK targets for accessible wildlife, provide green routes for walking and cycling in our cities, absorb storm water and reduce the risk of urban flooding, filter pollution from the air and increase the attractiveness of their surroundings for inward investment and economic regeneration. The Government Minister for parks, Tony McNulty, has acknowledged all these benefits, but so far the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister shows little sign of contributing generously from central funds.

Policy conflict in the countryside
Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage is a national programme that aims to revive our lowland heather moorland and its wildlife. The scale of success is spectacular, and the £14m of Heritage Lottery Fund grants are helping to completely recreate 2,500 hectares of this important habitat, and bring 42,000 hectares back into good heart. This will add up to 70% of the heathland target for the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. However, much of the habitat recovery work involves undoing the damage done by public funding from another pocket. Since the second world war much of our natural heritage has been sacrificed to changing practices in publicly subsidised farming and forestry. The sand lizard, nightjar, cotton grass and golden plover are at last returning, thanks in part to lottery-funded ecological management by such bodies as the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts and RSPB. 

At the same time, foot-and-mouth disease has helped us realise that the visitor appeal of a sensitively managed, popular and accessible rural landscape is of even greater economic value than the food it can produce. Nevertheless, the damaging and unsustainable bad practice still continues to be subsidised in ways that all too often seem to be in conflict with our lottery spending.

The heathland restoration in the uplands brings another valuable economic benefit to set alongside tourism and recreation. Reducing grazing and blocking drains brings back the wildlife and improves public enjoyment. It also helps to restore the natural absorbency of peatland bogs and thus reduces the risk of downstream flooding. This very worthwhile added benefit fits comfortably with the Water Framework Directive: new European legislation calling for an ecologically sympathetic style of management for whole river catch-ments. The cost of recent urban flooding in the UK has already run to billions of pounds. Will HLF-funded models of sustainable heathland management now be used as models for reshaping public-sector farming subsidies and private-sector water management?

Heritage as a foreign earner
Our national heritage is a highly marketable resource – a sleeping giant on the foreign earnings balance sheet. Our historic townscapes, city museums, parks and gardens, and the countryside itself, all feature strongly in the marketing of UK plc. Thanks in large part to HLF funding, many of the nation’s heritage assets are being given a new lease of life. But shouldn’t there be something more?

One of the lessons learnt through the foot-and-mouth epidemic, and reinforced by New York’s 9/11, was the huge significance of our tourism earnings –several times the value of farm food production in the rural economy, and a major factor in the fortunes of so much of urban Britain, too. Is that ‘revelation’ really influencing government spending? Take the glorious example of Stonehenge. As a World Heritage Site and a marketing icon, Stonehenge is helping to earn many millions of dollars for the UK every year. The Heritage Lottery Fund has just supported English Heritage in the first stage of a £20m initiative to revolutionise the Stonehenge visitor experience. Will it jolt the other necessary spending into life? The Highways Agency is still considering cut-price ways of burying Stonehenge road traffic underground. The historic landscape setting is still being farmed intensively and inappropriately for wheat, and the western half of the historic landscape remains outside the boundary of the World Heritage Site.

Let’s hope that with so much heritage investment now in place, so much good practice, and such popular support, the Government itself will be encouraged to stump up the funds and shape appropriate land-use policies that will do more to help sustain investment in the heritage economy.

The author has been a Trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund since June 1998. He is an independent environmental adviser to industry and government, a writer and broadcaster