CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 35 INFRASTRUCTURE Volunteers surveying at Broke Hall as part of the Historic England’s Suffolk registration project. The park was added to the register in 2024. (Photo: The Gardens Trust) JENIFER WHITE Compiling a register of gardens and other land The Register of Parks and Gardens has proved an authoritative resource, but it is time to review the designation and protection measures for our designed landscape heritage. Forty-three years on from the power vested in the National Heritage Act 1983 to ‘compile a register of gardens and other land… of special historic interest’, there are now 1,720 designated heritage assets embracing designed ornamental landscape and places of recreation. The Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England continues to gently grow. The registrations range from gardens of grand homes to housing schemes, public green spaces, cemeteries and institutions. The principal purposes of the register were to identify sites of a high level of historic interest in the context of England’s cultural heritage, and to encourage owners and others to appreciate, maintain, repair and enhance them. Ahead of the 1983 Act, the chair of the Historic Buildings Commission, Jennifer Jenkins, set up a new committee of experts to get to work on a list of sites ready to hand over to the newly created English Heritage. The Garden History Society (now the Gardens Trust) was very much involved in championing a register and contributed to developing the prototype. The first volumes of the register were published a year later, in 1984. The entries were brief and it was acknowledged early on that the register would need developing further. The initial sole register inspector and a consultancy service provided by the University of York’s Centre for the Conservation of Historic Parks and Gardens was expanded into a small team with planning and landscape design expertise. The 1987 Great Storm catapulted English Heritage into defining which registered sites were ‘outstanding’ for the purpose of awarding grants, and to push on preparing maps for each one; and conservation management plans became firmly established as tools to understand significance and plan programmes of work. Defining the boundaries for each registration led to English Heritage identifying and contacting all owners as required in the 1983 Act. This was a significant additional task as many sites are in split ownership. By the early 1990s, planning casework, owners’ concerns, a greater interest in garden history and advances in conservation management planning highlighted the need for a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of the register. The new English Heritage chair, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, assigned significant funding, which has never been matched since. The register team was significantly expanded to create a multidisciplinary approach covering landscape design, horticulture, garden and art history, and landscape archaeology. During the 1990s there were three major programmes aimed at improving the coverage and quality of the register: the Register Review Programme (1993–2000), the Register Upgrade Programme (1996–2000) and THE LISTING PROCESS IN ENGLAND
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