Review of 2024

Posted on 16.12.2024

Projects and events

We started the year with two new executive co-directors, who joined HTVF at the end of 2023, bringing in a new National Lottery Heritage Fund grant for our 2024 project work. This has led to a number of events, including:

○ A day seminar on the management of heritage assets and development in smaller settlements, which explored topics such as:

  • landscape character assessment and the design and planning of green infrastructure;
  • neighbourhood development plans and conservation area appraisals;
  • the use of an understanding of a settlement’s history to inform its conservation and renewal; and
  • community involvement in conservation projects.

○ A forum event on the development of new neighbourhoods in old places, which explored case studies and ideas that covered a range of topics relating to community and place, including:

  • the design of new neighbourhoods;
  • community engagement for both rural and urban projects;
  • a landscape-based approach to development;
  • the use of quality panels to review developments;
  • design codes, legacy development and locality; and
  • an exploration of heritage and the distillation of place.

In-person regional visits

We have re-established our programme of in-person events in different regions, with visits to:

  • Stoke Ferry, Norfolk, where a walking tour led by local residents provided a living history of the high street. During this visit we explored locally supported plans for new housing, the community-owned village pub, and potential futures for other village assets.
  • Hudswell, North Yorkshire, where we found out about community-led developments. We visited St Michael’s, a redundant church which is in the process of being converted into a hostel for walkers and cyclists; nearby new community eco-homes; and The George & Dragon pub, which is in community ownership.

Webinars

For those who can’t join our in-person events, we are continuing to run webinars. These have included:

  • Creating vibrant villages and towns with Penelope Tollitt and David McDonald, which looked at the sustainability of historic places and considered the importance of human scale of historic towns and villages for social connectivity, using the work of Jan Gehl to tease out some of the ways in which vibrant places can be created.
  • Heritage economics with Dave Chetwyn, which explored how heritage fits into the Government’s growth agenda, as well as economic viability; heritage, high streets and housing; and a more strategic view of planning for heritage.
  • OpenHeritage and the rescue of 170-175 High Street, Sunderland, with Martin Hulse and John Pendlebury, which provided an insight into a project that has been an important stimulus and catalyst for a historic but rundown area of Sunderland. This area was also a ‘Collaborative Heritage Lab’ in the OpenHeritage project, which sought to identify and test best practice of adaptive heritage reuse across Europe.

Organisational development

Earlier this year we were delighted to learn that His Majesty King Charles will be continuing his patronage of our organisation, as part of his long-standing support for the built and natural environment. We are also very pleased to announce that the Historic Towns & Villages Forum is now a registered charity, a change which reflects our role and our ambition to convene important forum discussions at this time of significant change.

It has been a pleasure to host three micro-internships and to meet HTVF members and new and existing contacts at our events and at a variety of other sector events, from the annual Heritage Alliance ‘Heritage Day’ to sector planning days and the Oxford Open Doors weekend. We’d like to thank everyone who has attended, spoken at, and otherwise contributed to HTVF events over the past year, and we look forward to meeting again and collaborating on projects in the year ahead.

 

(Top image: Christmas wreath. Photo by Erwan Hesry via Unsplash.)

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