The Gardens Trust have made available a number of documents that can help anyone without a background in planning to become familiar enough with the process to follow an application, to identify potential impacts and to develop a response if appropriate. It is usually better to collaborate with the CGT conservation and planning coordinator rather than to respond as an individual because the Gardens Trust and the various county gardens trusts have the weight of statutory consultees in planning applications that affect heritage landscapes.
The documents in the list below are freely available to download. They can also be found with further information on the Gardens Trust planning resources webpage.
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Eight Steps for Approaching the Application | A step-by-step guide on responding to a planning application, drawing upon a similar leaflet from the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) but focusing upon historic designed landscapes. |
| Assessing the Planning Application | A presentation that shows how to extract the information you need from a planning application to identify potential threats to historic designed landscapes, using a real example from West Sussex. |
| Ingredients of a Planning Letter | Another presentation that takes you through the structure and process of writing a good planning application response letter. |
| Planning Letter Templates | A template letter, in WORD format, that can be edited to comment on a planning application that affects a landscape or garden that is registered on the Parks and Gardens Heritage List. |
| Example Planning Response Letter | A hypothetical response to an actual historical planning application, to show how you might use the GT template above to write a planning letter on behalf of CGT. |
| Useful Extracts from the National Planning policy Framework (2019) | When responding to an application, you need to relate the proposal to specific paragraphs of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), 2019. This document identifies the sections that relate to the historic environment. |
| Next Steps | The next steps: a presentation on how to put into practice what has been learned from the material above. |
| Unforgettable Gardens | A briefing note from the Gardens Trust that attempts to build on public interest engendered by the ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton anniversaries to put the spotlight on the landscapes at risk. |
If you have a query with regards to developments that affect heritage landscapes in Cambridgeshire or if you have a conservation project that you would like us to support, please contact Mark Wilkinson on admin@cambridgeshiregardenstrust.org.uk
Cambridgeshire Gardens Trust 