Listed runways

I have never had much confidence in heritage legislation since I discovered that I would need to seek permission to have a row of leylandii trees in my garden felled. This, not long after the Highways Agency’s bulldozers had torn their way through Twyford Down, and half of Smithfield Market was condemned for redevelopment. No matter how ghastly or inappropriate, every tree in my garden is officially protected because I live in a conservation area. I can’t prune, fell or lop without informing my local tree officer. Nor can I remove the 1970s garden wall or change my 1980s plastic window frames without permission. Just about the only thing I can do is demolish, save for one brick, the 18th-century cottage in which they are fitted: as the Shimizu Corporation found to its benefit a few years ago in Victoria Street in London, a loophole in the heritage laws allows you to partly demolish a building in a conservation area so long as you don’t quite go the whole hog.

Next week English Heritage announces the first in a series of reforms claimed to rationalise the heritage laws, much to the relief, one imagines, of the poor sod once prosecuted for removing the pebbledash from his stone cottage in the Cotswolds on the grounds that he had violated an important 1960s alteration. On Wednesday the government quango will launch a series of pilot projects demonstrating what it describes as a more ‘flexible’ approach to the management of old buildings. Rather than send the heritage police to snoop on your original features, then write to warn you that you touch your architraves at your peril, it promises that in future heritage officers will be more co-operative.