1st May 2010, 04:13 PM
kevin wooldridge Wrote:I often work in a country (Norway) where archaeology is properly regulated by law and indeed developers might need to wait in queue for the archaeological resource to be assessed/mitigated....but the system works. Whats more development is often turned down if the archaeology or landscape is thought important enough to preserve. Developers fit around the restrictions or they develop sites where there are no archaeological implications.
I don't quite understand how anyone could argue that the UK system of always deferring to speculators is adequate or even desirable. Why don't we just say 'No' a little more often....
Eerrr, a lot of developments in the UK get stopped, re-designed, moved etc because of archaeology. A publication report I'm in the middle of writing at the moment is being severely handicapped by the fact that we effectively only trial-trenched the site, then the block of flats that they were putting on the site got re-designed to leave the archaeology in situ, meaning that I've got not-a-lot to write about (actually loads, shame we couldn't dig any more, Meso-Med with everything between, but it's all still there under the flats for someone else to play with in 50 years, and is now Scheduled). A large part of consultancy work is advising clients not to build where they wanted to, and there are a lot of pipelines that are a lot more bendy than the designers originally envisaged :face-huh: