14th October 2005, 07:06 PM
Quote:quote:Eh? Maybe someone needs to educate planners about the need to assess just how interesting the archaeology is before they allow a developer erase it for good! Am I mis reading this or are you actually acquiessing to the view that the archaseology in the North isn't as interesting as that in the south?
Most sites aren't Stonehenge so maybe we should just bulldoze all the stuff that that isn't scheduled and save the planners from having to think too hard and ourselves the worry.
[u]I </u> don't think it's less interesting, it's just that in some Northern counties the population appears to have been much less nucleated and dense as in the South, so a dig in the centre of a medieval town is often likely to come up with little more than a couple of shallow pits, and if your lucky the edges of the burgage plot. With the high turnover of planners it can be a struggle to keep the planners aware that pits and gullies can actually be interesting. It really shouldn't be a struggle to get conditions applied when archaeology is in the local plan, but it occasionally is.
Anyway it can't be all that bad otherwise we'd constantly be hearing about sites getting trashed, rather than one or two isolated examples.
PPG 16 does work in the North, just slightly differantly than in the South, as you would expect considering the areas have different archaeological remains.
Doesn't ring a bell :?