Rural setting is in real danger of being swept away

South Canterbury resident and heritage enthusiast Peter Styles questions whether the city’s special history is at risk of being compromised by the proposed 4,000-home Mountfield Park development

How can we characterise the heritage of Canterbury? Ancient? Multi-faceted? Historically unique? Religiously crucial? Architecturally valuable? Nationally important? Internationally recognised? Indeed, it is all of these.

Canterbury is one of only three smaller cities in England designated by Unesco as containing a World Heritage Site – Bath and Durham are the other two.

The site actually consists of three parts: the Cathedral of Christ Church (commonly known as Canterbury Cathedral), St Augustine’s Abbey (protected and managed by English Heritage) and St Martin’s Church, the first place of public, Christian worship to be recorded in England.

These three elements are all inscribed in the register of the Unesco World Heritage Centre under the auspices of an international convention.

Now, how should we describe the appearance and feel of the city of Canterbury itself, bearing in mind that a large part of the World Heritage Site lies at its heart?

Medieval? Compact? Liveable? Green? Surrounded by fields and woodland?

Well, the core of the city remains undeniably medieval; at least the pattern of most of the streets was first laid out in the Middle Ages.

Some buildings date from Tudor times, others even earlier. Bomb damage was inflicted during the Second World War, but mercifully not so extensively as to erase the historic footprint, nor most of the then surviving oldest buildings.

The fate of Coventry, for example, was dire by comparison.

This brings us to a key difference between Canterbury and many other English cathedral cities: our own urban boundary went largely unaffected by the industrial revolution.

There was a corresponding limit in the 19th and early 20th centuries on suburban expansion, of a type which would have been required to accommodate a larger workforce.

Even the houses built in response to population growth in the inter-war years and postwar have not overwhelmed our historic urban fabric.

Between Sturry and the city, as well as on the fringes of Wincheap, for example, open countryside survives.

To the east of New Dover Road and to the west of Old Dover Road walkers are quickly out among fields and hedgerows.

This in turn has meant that the rural backdrop to the Cathedral and the Abbey, when viewed from various vantage points, has remained intact, much as it looked for many hundreds of years.

So today we can in fact still describe our city as compact, liveable and mostly surrounded by fields and woodland.

Around the ring-road and along its feeder roads the city does not appear as green as it once was.

Tree planting has been woefully neglected along highways; trees and shrubs have been tragically sacrificed in municipal spaces, especially car parks; and gardens have disappeared in the course of reconstruction across the city.

Greenness can still be restored with the right policy initiatives and community goodwill.

The city’s compactness, livability and rural surrounds, however, are now under threat from residential development on a scale never before witnessed within sight of the Bell Harry tower of the Cathedral.

Unesco publishes guidelines to help authorities with responsibility for protecting World Heritage Sites.

It points out “that it is common for [heritage] places to be threatened by adverse developments in their surroundings.

In these circumstances, decisions taken for wider economic or social benefits must be compatible with the well-being of the heritage place”.

The UK government’s own National Planning Policy Framework stipulates that “the significance [of a heritage asset] can be harmed ... through development within its setting”.

This stipulation has been reinforced by a landmark judgment in the Court of Appeal in 2014, in which the appeal judges made clear that a local authority bears a duty to carefully consider such harm, independently of its assessment of the economic benefits of allowing the development.

A few of our city councillors, in speaking out or voting against the plan for Mountfield Park in December last year, have demonstrated that they take such guidelines seriously.

The approach taken by city planning officers together with the majority on the planning committee, and the imprecise recommendations given to them by Historic England, appear less convincing.

Did officers ever consider commissioning a professional heritage assessment by fully independent architectural and environmental experts?

Did they evaluate the merit of refusing development on the field below Lower Barton Farm and the escarpment above Barton Road so as to preserve a significant green buffer, as part of the backdrop to views of the Cathedral from the north? If not, why not?

The Canterbury World Heritage Site may remain inscribed in the Unesco register (though its status will be subject to review in July, in the light of harm to its setting through planned development), but some epithets and phrases we habitually use to describe our wonderful city, valid for over 1,000 years, seem destined to become outdated.

‘Residential development on a scale never before witnessed within sight of the Bell Harry tower of the Cathedral’

Peter Styles