Now there are plans for a giant swine farm, rearing 4,400 pigs a year, with
two giant facilities just 450 metres from the medieval moat and ornamental
water gardens of Upton Cressett, which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. We
also have a Deserted Medieval Village and a Roman settlement at Upton
Cressett, making that three Grade I listed buildings and three Scheduled
Ancient Monuments.

The swine farm planning application will be an important test case for
heritage protection safeguards under the Government’s new National Planning
Policy Framework (NPPF). It is the first application of its type anywhere
near Grade I assets.

Upton Cressett is special because of its tranquility, beauty and ancient
landscape. The scenery is among the finest in the county; when Sir John
Betjeman visited for the Shell Guide to Shropshire, he called it a “remote
and beautiful place”. Yet after investing a considerable amount of money
creating an award-winning heritage attraction – Best Hidden Gem in the UK at
the Hudson’s Heritage Awards – I face the prospect of commercial ruination.

Huge amounts of money will be wasted fighting this planning battle, when in
fact its Grade I protection should have meant the council never even allowed
it to pass the initial “scoping” request. The pig factory proposal has been
condemned by the president of the Shropshire Campaign to Protect Rural
England, the Historic Houses Association, the Churches Conservation Trust,
the chairman of the Bridgnorth and District Tourist Association and Loyd
Grossman, chairman of the Heritage Alliance.

But, despite our status, we have no statutory guarantee that even this will be
sufficient to prevent development. Whatever a council may wish, the final
decision is ultimately at the whim of the Planning Inspectorate. No other
country in the world has a history of heritage protection like we do here.
We need to cherish this, not destroy it for short-term building growth.

One hundred years ago, the heritage tourism industry in Britain was born,
thanks to an inspired piece of legislation. The 1913 Ancient Monuments Act
gave protection to a select range of “unoccupied” buildings of national
importance – not just ruins, pre-historic sites and monuments – and, for the
first time, allowed public access to ancient monuments in public ownership,
such as Stonehenge.

Today, heritage tourism is worth more than £20 billion to the economy, and is
growing at a rate of 2.6 per cent per year. It is Britain’s fifth largest
industry. “It would not be that size without historic houses, historic
monuments and historic landscapes,” says Loyd Grossman, who speaks on behalf
of 90 heritage groups. “No one comes here for the palm trees.”

Later this month, at the futuristic Grade I Lloyds Building in the City of
London, English Heritage will announce plans to commemorate the Act’s
centenary with an exhibition telling the story of the heritage protection
movement. It is an apt venue because, under chief executive Simon Thurley,
English Heritage has looked forward to safeguard Britain’s unique history
and architecture, rather than wallowing in nostalgia and conservation aspic.

No doubt Heritage Minister Ed Vaizey will use the anniversary to give the
usual reassurances about the Government’s commitment to safeguarding
Britain’s unique heritage. But there are some deeply troubling
contradictions, despite the promises contained in the NPPF. The reality is
that the Coalition’s enthusiasm for relaxing planning laws, diluting
heritage protection and encouraging more development right up to the walls
of our greatest “heritage assets” – from wind farms to social housing – is
making a mockery of these promises.

Ever since the draft NPPF was published, there have been a number of Planning
Inspectorate decisions that undermine the very ethos behind the Ancient
Monuments Act. Though the NPPF contains a clause protecting the “historic
setting” of a building, it offers little by way of guaranteed statutory
protection, as seen by the fiasco of allowing wind turbines at the Naseby
battlefield site on land owned by Kelmarsh Hall, or the equally dangerous
decision to allow 125 ft turbines at the Grade I Elizabethan house of
Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire, owned by the National Trust. The
latter case has been “called in” for judicial review.

Other worrying examples are planning applications for wind farms next to the
Northamptonshire manor houses in which the Gunpowder Plot was hatched in
1605, and that of Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur.

Unless the Government tightens the level of statutory protection given through
the listings system, the celebrations could be hollow. It won’t be the fault
of Mr Thurley, who is only too aware of the disturbing disconnect between
what the Government likes to say publicly about heritage protection and the
dark arts of planning reality.

The main problem is that the listings system is badly in need of reform. What
the 1913 Ancient Monuments Act did not protect were private dwellings (or
ecclesiastical buildings) because, back in the Edwardian era, whether you
lived in Blenheim Palace or a Battersea railway cottage, the maxim that an
“Englishman’s home is his castle” still applied to planning policy. If you
wanted to rip out your family’s medieval Great Hall stone fireplace and sell
it to William Hearst, nobody was going to stop you.

Mr Vaizey should give serious consideration to the re-introduction of the 2008
Heritage Protection Bill – only dropped by the last government because of
the credit crunch, despite strong cross-party support – and to a full review
of the listing system, which has not been revised for more than 20 years. An
embarrassing amount of the listing information is inaccurate and out of
date. At the very least, statutory protection for Grade I or Grade II*
buildings – that are open to the public, and are the architectural dramatis
personae of David Cameron’s “Britain Is Great” campaign – should be given
tightened statutory protection so as to avoid costly planning battles.

There are currently around 400,000 listed buildings in this country, 10,000 of
which are Grade I. Of these, around 45 per cent are churches, meaning that
only a tiny number of Grade I or Grade II* historic houses in this country
are actually lived in today. Such historic houses provide a huge amount to
the cultural wealth of the nation.

Surely the Government has a duty to properly protect this heritage? What is
the point of having a Grade I or Grade II* listing system to “protect
heritage” if such designations, along with ancient monuments, protected
wrecks and battlefields, offer no real protection from the current planning
free-for-all that the Government seems set upon?

At a recent conference on The Future of the Country House, there was a
chilling lecture chronicling the fate of the Irish country house since
independence. Partly for political reasons, its architectural heritage has
been desecrated by an ineffectual listing system that has greatly harmed its
heritage tourism appeal.

This cannot be allowed to happen in the UK, because of an outdated heritage
protection system that, on the one hand, has the Government spending £27
million promoting our great “heritage” around the world and, on the other,
allows housing development close to the 14th-century (Grade I) Great Coxwell
Barn in Oxfordshire, which William Morris described as “unapproachable in
dignity”.

There is a strong argument that for those houses or buildings of “exceptional
merit” (as Grade I buildings are described) which are open to the public,
and which directly contribute to the heritage economy by way of employment,
education and cultural heritage, there should be a statutory defence against
development in the immediate vicinity.

Next year will see the 40th anniversary of the famous 1974 VA exhibition on
The Destruction of the English Country House, which was widely credited with
raising public awareness of the cultural vandalism that was being done to
the country house and their great estates, described by Evelyn Waugh as
perhaps the nation’s greatest art form and greatest contribution to Western
civilisation.

Let’s hope there is not a UK planning history exhibition 100 years from now
entitled The Destruction of Arcadia.