Cambridge Historic Core Appraisal
An award winning appraisal of an internationally renowned city centre Conservation Area
The Historic Core of Cambridge is one sector of Cambridge's vast Central Conservation Area (No.1). Because the Historic Core is a complex place, a methodology for undertaking the appraisal of this area was devised as a hybrid of a Conservation Area Appraisal and a Conservation Plan.
The Core Appraisal defines the significance of Cambridge by initially considering the key characteristics of the whole area and then analysing the character on a street by street basis. The individual streets are then graded in terms of their significance and their specific characteristics described. This allows decisions to be made which avoid damaging the fundamental importance of the particular street.
A key aspect of the Core Appraisal work was to make the street by street sections as 'user friendly' as possible. The title boxes were colour coded so that the significance of each street could be seen at a glance. The information relating to the individual buildings was presented in tabular form to avoid the text becoming too wordy, whilst key characteristics were succinctly presented.
General photographs were combined with detailed ones of the key characteristics and a clear map was used to show as much information as possible. The purpose of producing the information in this way was to make it easy for any owner of a building or potential developer to extract the key information relating to the street very easily.
The Historic Core Appraisal was adopted on 15 August 2006. It won a Royal Town Planning Institute commendation in 2007.
The project was begun whilst Jon was the Conservation & Design Manager at Cambridge City Council and continued and completed by QuBE.