Historic Environment Policy and Practice Vol 16, No 1, 2025

The latest 190-page bumper edition of the Historic Environment Policy and Practice (Vol 16, No 1, 2025) concentrates particularly on the relationship between heritage, ecology and the natural environment. It explores, for example, management of archaeology in woodland and forestry. The paper likely to be of most interest to Context readers is the one by IHBC member Kate Clark (formerly with English Heritage), providing an overview of the integration of heritage with quality-of-life capital in the 1990s.

This had aimed to create integrated placemaking based on an understanding of what people valued. Its origins could be traced to a sequence of early policies with common themes in that era: embedding heritage and sustainability; integrating nature and heritage; looking beyond protected sites at wider concepts of character; scenario planning; and community approaches. At the time this was a new approach to environmental capital and a precursor to today’s natural capital/ ecosystems services model, capturing the value that flows from the services provided by stocks of environmental assets.

Clark points out that the DCMS and the Arts and Humanities Research Council are currently supporting a new Culture and Heritage Capital initiative, looking at how the natural capital approach can be applied to culture and heritage. The intention of Clark’s paper is to draw attention to the earlier work in the hope that it might be of interest to those involved in the cultural landscape, everyday heritage, scenario planning and community engagement.

This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 184, published in September 2025. It was written by Peter de Figueiredo, reviews editor, Context.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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