REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 31 proposals and identifies potential conflict or friction with preserving or enhancing the conservation area, as well as formulating preservation and enhancement proposals that would supplement and complement existing regeneration proposals and activity. Proposals of the Conservation Area Regeneration Plan are already being taken forward by Wirral Council and partners, including Birkenhead’s Pride in Place Board. A similar approach of looking at conservation areas as a component of a place rather than simply a designation was used in a recent conservation areas project for the Forest of Dean Council and Historic England. The output here was an action plan SPD with defined priority steps for the first three years for all 27 conservation areas in the district. This required an ability to understand significance and objectively understand the issues and opportunities presented by the condition, activity and underlying trends in each conservation area. Being the first action plan of its kind, LUC devised several different ways of categorising, assessing and ranking the conservation areas to identify, among other things: • the conservation areas with the most regeneration and placemaking opportunities; • the conservation areas most likely to be ‘at risk’ unless robust management proposals are put in place; • and the conservation areas that are neither at risk nor in need of a regeneration programme, but have specific preservation and enhancement priorities. The action plan is therefore comprehensive in scope but proportionate in the level of focus given to each conservation area. The outputs of the project are all interactive and accessible online as a Story Map with a downloadable summary sheet for each conservation area. The action plan will enable public, private and community stakeholders to deliver the actions for their conservation area, either individually or in partnerships, as part of an overall framework of priorities. The action plan is clear that conservation area management, preservation and enhancement are long processes and are not solely the responsibility of the local authority. The online outputs include LUC’s methodology and baseline data, which were developed in partnership with the Forest of Dean and Historic England. Design Codes have a role to play in regeneration as well as day-today development management. Two adopted design codes have recently been prepared that respectively cover the Lake District National Park and the neighbouring Westmorland and Furness local planning authority area. Both codes put the understanding of place and context, including landscape, townscape and the historic environment, at a critical first step of the design process. They both place code, guidance, signposting to resources and checklists regarding place and context before the wider code. The aim of doing so is not simply Forest of Dean: the action plan for town centres like Coleford seeks to address vacant shops and buildings, but also the underlying issue of the role and vitality of the town centre as a whole. Forest of Dean: connectivity between Lydney town centre to its historic harbour 2km away on the bank of the Severn is an important part of the conservation area’s action plan.
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