14th October 2005, 03:30 PM
These are the sort of things I was thinking of when I started this thread. Surely it's got nothing to do with how "interesting" the archaeology is? (Funnily enough, I've always been rather jealous of northern archaeology - we have no Vikings at all where I work, and the Romans didn't really bother much either...). We all use exactly the same set of Government Guidance documents, English Heritage papers, etc. as everyone else in the country to base our policies on - yet protection/mitigation regimes vary, and appear (from what I hear) to be more robust towards the south, where we seem to have an easier time getting our point of view across to the planning officers (not the Planning Inspectors though - now there is a rant all of it's own...). Is it a matter of being more vociferous about the value of the resource? Are we fighting a battle against the tide of development in certain areas? Maybe we need to fight our corner better... but how? And in what arena?