Heritage consultant in Coventry

Coventry is the one place on this list where the practice has direct inside experience of the planning authority: Charlotte held a Conservation Officer post at Coventry City Council, assessing exactly the applications she now helps clients prepare.

The city's heritage is unusually layered. Substantial medieval fabric survives in pockets alongside a post-war reconstruction that is itself now recognised as significant, and the two require quite different arguments. Proposals affecting post-war buildings in particular are often met with owner surprise that the building is designated at all.

That mid-century layer is where assessments most often go wrong. The significance of post-war architecture tends to lie in planned relationships between buildings, in materials and in original detailing, none of which is intuitive to an owner accustomed to thinking of heritage as meaning old.