Introduction: Valuing Historic Environments

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the cultural and historical specificity of heritage. It discusses a variety of cultural landscapes and construct their object landscape' or environment' in different ways. The book discusses the designation and management of monuments, memorials and public art and focuses underscore the social and political affects of heritage. It investigates the ways in which people engage with cultural heritage and landscape. Inevitable debates arise over whether identifying such housing as special' is the imposition of an avant-garde cultural elite on residents and on the public purse. The book presents a long historical perspective over how something that might now seem the bedrock of a particular type of Englishness, the Georgian house, has been perceived in a variety of historically contingent ways.