7792 Visualising impacts on the setting of heritage assets

Visualisation techniques are often used to gauge the impact of a proposed development on the setting of a heritage asset such as a listed building. This project aims to improve the way visualisation is used, both to prevent unnecessary costs for developers and to make visualisations more helpful to heritage regulators. The project envisages two complementary strands - the first to review built-out developments where visualisations were used, to see how useful they were in gauging the impact with the benefit of hindsight, the second retrospectively to apply a diagrammatic relationship-mapping technique advocated by Historic England to see how it might have helped with the selection of visualisation points or sequences of points from which to assess impacts more robustly.

Prospective contractors are invited to involve representatives from the relevant professional areas in the finalisation of the project design. Suppliers of visualisations, planners and heritage consultants might all be able to contribute usefully to the development of a project design. Consideration should also be given to the post-construction opinions of the communities affected by development.

The impact of the project on heritage practice will be assessed after an appropriate period of time, and prospective contractors are asked to design an assessment survey which they or another party might carry out to complete the project.