REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 29 WHY ALL REGENERATION SHOULD BE HERITAGE-LED OWEN BARTON THE TERM ‘heritage-led regeneration’ has come to strike me as odd. In a country where you can barely move without bumping into a heritage asset or stepping into an area-based designation, surely most, if not all, regeneration activity should inherently be ‘heritage-led’? The term also suggests caveats, compromises, limitations and being niche in nature compared to regeneration in general. Perhaps there is also the stronger suggestion of public subsidy in the ‘heritage-led’ prefix, when, of course, all regeneration activity involves public and private funders and actors. Anyone involved in heritage, or indeed who reads Context, knows how the successful response to established character, reuse of heritage assets, the better revealing of significance, and contextual new design can require much more time, thought and attention to detail than masterplanning hectares of cleared land. The constraints can be greater and the issues to be addressed can range from ‘macro’ down to ‘micro’ in scale. However, the results are environments that are unique and frequently exhilarating, intriguing and valued by the public. Heritage constraints foster creativity, a finer grain of buildings and uses, and offer the types of spaces that most new build developments aim for but rarely reach. It is an unfortunate and sad state of affairs that most regeneration plans and schemes identify heritage assets as ‘constraints’ rather than ‘opportunities’ and take a reductive approach to how the area to be regenerated has developed and evolved over time. The whole issue of heritage can be side-stepped or glossed over Forest of Dean: This Victorian brewery in Mitcheldean Conservation Area was in the mid-20th century the UK headquarters and photocopier factory of Rank Xerox
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