Design Codes and the Historic Environment

Historic England: The public body that looks after England’s historic environment. They champion historic places to help people understand, value and care for them.

Node were commissioned by Historic England to undertake a research and development project in order to advise on:

• How design codes could be used to preserve and enhance the significance of heritage assets
• How the character of historic environments could be properly and proportionately translated into design codes
• How design codes could encourage heritage assets to be adopted and/or embraced within development to make contributions to new environments
• How this could be practically achieved in both an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Node produced a report setting out a 5-step method, that expands on the National Model Design Code guidance for heritage assets and historic places, to maximise opportunities for the preservation or enhancement of heritage assets and the contributions they make to places through coded development or mitigate risks of harmful outcomes.

Part B of the report provided a series of fully illustrated, hypothetical development scenarios to understand how the 5-step method could be applied in practice. The scenarios included developments in historic rural farmsteads, historic industrial townscapes, reinforcing settlement character in urban fringe locations, as well as design coding for tall buildings in city centre environments.