Selected Summary Proceedings from Day Two of Cultural Landscape Management

13 June 2008, University of Cumbria, Ambleside, Lake District

Related pages:
Cultural Landscape Management introduction
Cultural Landscape Management: Day One

Capturing the spirit of place, delegate Pierre-Marie Tricaud sketching Windermere

11. Pierre-Marie Tricaud (Institut d’Amenagement et d’urbanisme, Paris): Lavaux and Champagne vineyards, Switzerland and France

• Comparative sites: which are the common issues of WH landscapes, esp vineyards?
• Lavaux, the Swiss Riviera, relatively well-known landscape, little-known produce, small area; Champagne well-known produce but little known landscape, large area
• Lavaux was inscribed in 2007, Champagne is on the Tentative List
• Lavaux noted for its land-use: terraces; Champagne not noted for remarkable land-use: what is remarkable are the cellars, dug into the chalk
• Common problems: poor road infrastructure design, restoration without due regard to traditional methods, loss of some bio-diversity
• Both have evolving landscapes, changes in cultivation such as the direction of terraces (Lavaux); landscape change in Champagne more dramatic
• Urban development – Land protection laws in Switzerland and price of land in Champ. prevents this
• Challenges: population and housing; sustainable energy (impact on landscape); innovations required for tourist management, e.g. light rail to reduce road congestion; necessity for co-operation between all people and organisations, use of internet to do this

12. Barry Joyce (Vice-Chair ICOMOS-UK World Heritage Committee): Derwent Valley Mills, UK, Sustaining an Industrial Landscape

• WHS inscription based on the landscape as the ‘cradle of the factory system’
• Landscape influenced the industrialists of the early mills
• Survival of the social infrastructure as well as the mills for workers
• It remains a working landscape: hardly any of it is a ‘museum’
• It is managed as a cultural landscape even though it is not inscribed as one
• The management team is multi-disciplinary and all based in the County Council: architects, historic buildings specialists, landscape architects and those in environmental division
• The community is fundamental to the success of the WHS
• No. 1 concern during consultation was  congestion on the roads: importance of making more of the railway: also part of the heritage: Derwent Valley Line
• Threats include development which would adversely affect townscape
• WHS status has brought international attention which did not exist before (unlike areas such as the Lake District)
• Use of the web has been important to sustain attention globally
• Conservation of buildings remains a constant challenge – use of grant schemes for repair and restoration
• Two ambitions: for centres north and south of the WHS: working with volunteers from Arkwright society
• Slow conservation = good conservation

13. Gábor Soós (Tocqueville Research Center, Budapest, Hungary): Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape, Hungary: Addressing the pressures of development

• Sense of place articulates the link between local value and global universal significance
• Status of the management plan in Hungary is ambiguous, more emphasis on processes
• Emergence of label “European Tokaj” takes site away from the importance of its locality
• ‘When you drink the wine you taste the landscape, when you’re in the landscape you taste the wine’
• Wine-making is fundamental to the site
• Capturing the intangible practices (history) – names of plots
• Importance of the region to the nation: captured in the national anthem:
• “And let Nectar’s silver rain
• Ripen grapes of Tokay soon.”
• Mixed population, not just Hungarians but Slovaks, Poles, Greeks and Jews (esp merchants)
• Challenge: need sustainable wine production, therefore need to manage production Europe-wide: challenges from the New World wine-making
• Should wine be terroir-based production or a technically made commodity: competing methods?
• Focus is on the uniqueness of place rather than the grape (which can be emulated elsewhere)
• Wine-making is culture: diversifying and sustaining a community
• Climate-change threats: using straw-fired power stations means straw is being grown instead of wine grapes

14. Discussion

• How has WH status been adopted into local planning?
• In Hungary ‘historic landscapes’ have a legal status, not so much for ‘cultural’
• Lavaux: Swiss legal protection is strong
• Champagne enjoys other forms of legal scheduling and inscription for monuments and sites: buffer zone helps
• Derbyshire: in England it is only a ‘material consideration’ for development on a WHS.  Test-case of Stonehenge.  The Draft Heritage Protection Bill does not make much reference to WHSs.  It is not in the content of English law.

15. Lord Clark of Windermere (Chair, Lake District World Heritage Project): Lake District World Heritage Aspirations and Challenges

• It has to be a sustainable bid
• The original Lake District bid failed but brought up the important issue of cultural landscapes which lay between cultural and natural sites
• Sense of place in a man-made landscape
• Hidden heritage: mining and the processing of ore (charcoal) impacting on forested area
• Tourism is more than just economic, it’s about coming to a place to be inspired, the idea of ‘refreshment and enjoyment in beauty’.  A physical beauty in natural and cultural values
• WH status being another constraining factor to local economy: the opinion of a few but the bid needs the rest of Cumbria and the North West to make it successful
• Not enough people to service the numbers of people who visit
• Need to go back to basics: sustainable and public transport
• Sense of place is about the past, if not look back to the past but using the ‘brightness’ of that past which allows people to work in this area; a common thread with the past which brings it all together

16. Open forum discussion

• The Lake District bid: the process of putting together the nomination and management plan has been worthwhile in itself even if it does not achieve the bid
• Landscape partnership scheme promoted by HLF: promoting cultural landscapes across the UK
• Emphasis on spirit of place = terroir
• Something you cannot get anywhere else
• Need to like where you like and promote it to others
• How to stimulate interest from the ‘bottom up’
• All landscapes: involvement of schools, take children to and through places and reveal it to them, your place matters
• Levels of appreciation at a local level is a key challenge internationally
• The drive should come from people who have consulted you, not the other way around
• Stimulating communities to think for themselves
• Having a conversation about what is special about a place: an open one
• We need to reflect diversity in our society
• Role of university (partic with relation to Lake District bid) to raise local aspirations
• Integrating personal histories and their understand of landscape
• Responses: ‘proposals for regeneration are too good for us’ – need to understand why people think this
• European Landscape Convention: ‘all landscapes matter.’  Reality is that richer areas seem to matter more…
• WHSs and ethnic diversity in the context of ‘cultural landscapes’ – whose culture?
• Suggestion of working with local schools to get young people to appreciate the landscapes – not just finding it on computers and watching it on TV
• How about getting kids with video cameras out in the landscape making the videos to go online!
• Environmental value – not discussed much at this conference
• Legislation in England still essentially Victorian, we need to educate the government in the concept of cultural landscapes; to take a more sophisticated approach (“hear, hear”)
• What is ICOMOS-UK doing to encourage joined-up thinking by government?
• European Landscape Convention is a start, as is working more with Natural England and similar organisations