ColchesterHistoricBuildingsForum

The draft local list will cover the old Borough of Colchester - in other words, Colchester town centre and almost all of the suburban areas around it as shown in this plan. Drawing up lists of this kind is a big job so we decided to limit our work to Colchester alone as opposed to the whole of its administrative district since Colchester has a large concentration of interesting and significant buildings and it faces the greatest pressure from development and redevelopment in the area.

The big day is Saturday 16th January 2010. There will be a presentation that afternoon (2.00-3.30 pm) in Lion Walk Congregational Church when members of the forum will talk about the buildings of Colchester and how the list was compiled.

Programme
A provisional draft local list will be compiled over the next two months. A brief description will be written for each of the buildings which are to be considered for the draft list, and photographs will be taken of them from the street. The draft list will be considered as being provisional until the initial phase of public consultation has been completed.

We want you to get involved. If you have any interesting or unusual photographs of Colchester buildings which either no longer exist or have been greatly changed, why not upload them here so that we can all see them? It’s a fairly easy process but you will need to register as a user. And if you have old pictures, you will need to have access to a scanner – or get somebody who has one to help you. You can also copy them with a digital camera but the results are usually not quite so good. Make sure that you only use pictures which are not somebody else’s copyright. Please go here to register, which will allow you to upload your pictures.

The project to create a ‘local list’ of buildings for Colchester was launched as planned in the Mayoral Suite last Thursday courtesy of the Mayor and Colchester Borough Council. The Mayor, Councillor Henry Spyvee, opened the proceedings with words of welcome and Councillor Lyn Barton, Portfolio Holder for Regeneration and Planning, introduced the speakers (Karen Syrett who is the Spatial Policy Manager at CBC, and Andrew Phillips, James Bettley and Philip Crummy who are members of the Forum). It was a very memorable and pleasant event shared by an audience which included MP Bob Russell and Councillors Ray Gamble (Chairman of Planning), Chris Hall (Local Development Framework Committee), and Jeremy Lucas (Essex County Council Cabinet Member for Heritage, Culture and the Arts).

The most significant of Colchester's buildings - well over three hundred in number - are protected by being 'listed'. As is recognised in central government guidelines (PPG 15), there are also buildings which do not appear in the official lists but are of local architectural or historical significance. The guidelines state that local authorities can adopt their own 'local list' of such buildings and draw up suitable policies in their local plans to give this particular group some protection. Over the years, many local authorities across England and Wales have adopted lists of this kind or are in the course of doing so, and Colchester intends to do the same.