Historic and Natural Environment Team

The Historic and Natural Environment Team is the County Council’s team of experts who look after Leicestershire and Rutland heritage information and make it available to be used in the planning process and in support of the enquiring local enthusiast or member of the public.

The County Council has a long history of collecting information about Leicestershire and Rutland.  Much of it has come from its museum service which started in Leicester in the 1840s, and its ecology service which started formally in the 1960’s.  By the 1990 Leicestershire had one of the most complete ecological, geological and historic records in the UK, and brought together information from its own fieldwork, from the museum collections and the many interested local people and societies.

The HNE team has inherited this information.  Although the museum service is still active in collecting information, objects and specimens it is not involved in planning work in the way it was some years ago.

In 2004 the County Council decided to bring all the planning use of such a wide range of subjects together in a new Historic and Natural Environment Team.   The team works within Country Parks, Rights of Way and Environmental Action in Peter Williams’s  Environment Group, and still has close contacts with its sister specialists in the museums service, all within the Environment and Heritage Service.

The HNE team covers five main areas: Historic Buildings and Historic Environment, Planning Archaeology, Planning Ecology and LERC,  Planning Geology and the Community Heritage Initiative.  

The Historic Buildings team under John Sharpe has the County’s experts on historic building repair and restoration, their role in planning and they distribute part of the Shire Grants as well as Historic Building Grants.  The team has been very successful in attracting funds from other sources such as English Heritage, and from the region.  The team also works with districts on compiling and maintaining the Buildings-at-Risk Register and Conservation Area reviews and Appraisals.  The team also maintains the County Council’s list of Listed Buildings. The grants help fund several hundred thousand pounds worth of restoration work of important local buildings, with the expertise of the HNE team ensuring repairs and restorations are carried out properly in terms of materials and design.

The Planning Archaeology team under Richard Clark looks after the Sites and Monuments Record or what is now known as the Historic Environment Record (HER).  This is a list of all items of known archaeological interest, from the Stone Age right up to almost the present day.  It includes standing remains, hidden remains and earthworks, sites of archaeological finds and digs, which can often link with the museum collections.  The list is linked to maps and the whole has been put into a computer system in at least a basic format and which is being added to every week.  The team check most of the counties’ planning applications against the HER and advise the planning authorities where more information is needed or where there is known archaeological interest, or the conditions on which plans could go ahead.  The team is also working with English Heritage to complete a Historic Landscape Characterisation scheme which will classify the historic landscape that can still be seen today and which will help us to better protect the rarest or oldest.

The Planning Ecology team with Jane McPhail, John Kramer and Kirsty Brazil do a similar job to the Archaeologists, but using instead the information in the LERC database and the many paper records which are behind it.  In addition they survey and monitor Local Wildlife Sites, and maintain the official register of them.   LERC (Leicestershire Environmental Resources Centre) is the ecological archive started by Ian Evans many years ago. Darwyn Sumner, Anona Finch, Lizzy Peat and Elaine Connor all work on it, it is still growing and attracting information, and we are trying to computerise as much information as possible.  We have a legacy of enormous numbers of paper records, too much to do currently, so we are concentrating on records of protected species, the information supporting Local Wildlife Sites, and other information that is coming to us in an electronic format.  We are allowed to charge for the commercial use of the ecological information and this pays for our costs in servicing those enquiries plus some of the work in making the information readily available. Darwyn Sumner also is our Information Officer working with Paul Ambrose on our computer systems across the team.

Planning Geology is undertaken when geological issues arise.  Our geologist Gill Weightman has use of the large geological archive held at the Barrow Museum Resources Centre and was instrumental in surveying many aggregate sites which formed the basis of the RIGS (Regionally Important Geological Sites) website which has helped put local geological information into the public domain.

The Community Heritage Initiative is the HNE’s outreach project.  It is the one area you are likely to have heard of!  Carolyn Holmes’ team have very successfully been running a wide range of natural history heritage projects.  Fiona Walker has been supporting the parish wardens across the county, she is our website expert and has running the many recording schemes which have helped to raise awareness of the importance of local information.  Kay Snowdon is our training expert and outreach expert with a special interest in trying to encourage young people to follow their interests in natural history.  Mandy Aletras is your friendly contact who keeps everything moving and connected – and of course Carolyn herself who lectures, talks and buzzes across the two counties.  One of the HNE’s challenges is to keep the CHI work alive after it formally ends, as an HLF project, in November 2008.

As well as being used by researchers and local interested people the information is used more and more in the planning process, in determining individual planning applications and also in the longer term strategic planning about where new developments should take place and how we plan for the next 100 years.  Most of each year’s many thousands of planning applications in the two counties are checked against the information held by the HNE team at Holly Hayes and County Hall.

As well as supplying a key planning function the HNE team also has a role in making the information held in the expert archaeological and ecological databases more available to the general public.  That is why we have embarked on two trial exercises in using websites to deliver complex local heritage data, the RIGS website and the CHI Portal.  They both allow records to be found by searching for a specific word, or by zooming in on a map.  Although the maps can be slow we are confident that we shall be able to develop sites along these lines so that a lot more of our local heritage information will be available in the future.

I hope you’ll agree the HNE is a wide-ranging, knowledgeable and friendly group of experts who work with many groups and individuals in Leicestershire and Rutland, providing an important County Council service, which it is uniquely suited to deliver.