Block Management in Amesbury

Two separate conservation areas were designated by the former district council within days of each other in 1980, and only one of them is the town. Amesbury itself was designated on 27 February 1980 and has an adopted appraisal and management plan dated September 2008, defining six character areas: Amesbury Park, the High Street, the Centre, Church Street, Salisbury Street and Avon Buildings. Its shape matters: the designation covers 66.3 hectares but only about 18 per cent of that lies inside the built-up area, because its western half is Amesbury Abbey park rather than townscape, so it accounts for just 2.2 per cent of the town. West Amesbury was designated separately on 29 February 1980 and is a small village about a mile west of the centre, with no overlap with the town at all. The 2008 appraisal recommended new Article 4 directions, a boundary extension to take in School Lane, Flower Lane and Avon Buildings, and urgent action on four listed buildings at risk; none of those recommendations appears to have been enacted. The appraisal also maps an area of archaeological potential within which development may attract conditions requiring archaeological recording, which is a real cost consideration for any groundworks in this town.

85 entries on the National Heritage List fall inside the parish, three Grade I and seven Grade II*, of which 59 sit inside the built-up area and 42 inside the conservation area. The three Grade I entries are Amesbury Abbey and West Amesbury House, both first listed in January 1953, and the parish church, whose official listed name is the Church of St Mary and St Melor rather than the Abbey Church, listed in February 1958; the official form is the one to use in any planning or legal document. Amesbury Abbey is also a Grade II* registered park and garden of 55.89 hectares, registered on 1 September 1987. The scheduled monument position is extraordinary and needs stating carefully: 101 scheduled monuments intersect the parish, about 4.2 per square kilometre, but 78 of them lie inside the World Heritage Site and only nine reach the built-up area. Eighteen entries in the parish are on the Heritage at Risk register and every one is a scheduled monument rather than a building, so no listed building in Amesbury is currently at risk.

Amesbury sits on the edge of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1986, and the planning consequence is less obvious than it looks. The designation covers 8.65 hectares of the built-up area, 1.6 per cent, in a strip along the north-western edge; the town centre is outside it, about 400 metres east of the boundary. It covers 35.9 per cent of the parish, 47.3 per cent of the Amesbury conservation area, which is the Abbey park half rather than the townscape, and 96.1 per cent of the West Amesbury conservation area. The point that catches people out is that there is no buffer zone. Only nine World Heritage Sites in England and Wales have one and this is not among them; setting is managed instead, and the adopted plan states in terms that the setting of the site is not precisely defined and will vary depending on the nature and visibility of the proposal. So a building outside the mapped line can still require a World Heritage assessment, the burden falls in the design and access statement, and because World Heritage Sites are sensitive areas under the environmental impact assessment regulations, lower screening thresholds apply than elsewhere.

Consent has to precede the Section 20 specification, not follow it, or leaseholders are consulted on work that cannot lawfully be done as described.

Changing agent is the company's decision, taken the way its articles require. The only part with a deadline is the notice the outgoing agent is contractually owed. On Amesbury heritage stock the consents history is what most often turns out to be incomplete, and its absence resurfaces later as a planning problem.

See the handover sequence in full, and our fees, which are a fixed annual amount with no commission on contractor work.