Norfolk Historic Landscape Characterisation

English Heritage summaries. 2004/05

The Norfolk Historic Landscape Characterisation Project forms part of a national initiative sponsored by English Heritage and which is being addressed at regional level with a co-ordinated programme covering the East of England.

The overall aim of Norfolk HLC is to create, rapidly, for the whole of the project area, a GIS-based, accessible and updateable characterisation (description and definition) of the project area’s landscape, in historic terms. The HLC will form part of the Norfolk Historic Environment Record (NHER), and will be created using existing information and understanding of the archaeological and historical attributes of the present day landscape. It will be broad and generalised, rather than detailed and site-specific.

This characterisation – the HLC - will be made in a way that makes it capable of contributing to emerging national and future regional HLC and to the wider agendas of Norfolk County Council and the District Councils, of amplifying and enriching overall landscape assessment in the county, and enhancing, contextualising and illuminating the NHER. In short it will be designed to support and improve the sustainable management of the historic environment and of continuing change within it.

The project is intended to provide in Norfolk a direct continuation of the methodology developed in recent years for Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire with local variation accommodated as necessary.  This should permit a reasonable degree of comparability of HLC results across the region.

The results of the programme will form a permanent and renewable database that will be utilised to provide information for a variety of planning, conservation and management-led initiatives and strategies, managing change not just in or near ‘special’ places but everywhere.

The Norfolk HLC Project started in July 2004, and is due to finish early in 2007.

This page was published on 15/11/2007