Libraries and leisure

About HCC's Landscape Unit:

The County Council's Landscape Unit has been in existence in one form or another since local government reorganisation in 1974. The County Council outsources most of its landscape consultancy requirements, enabling HCC to boast the leanest in-house county council landscape service in the country, whilst still.

The role of the landscape service is to:

• seek better landscape policy and practice in plans and processes affecting the county;
• support the conservation and enhancement of all the county's landscapes
• secure comment on the landscape impacts of selected development proposals; and
• work with others to develop integrated approaches to land management

The unit is particularly concerned with fostering landscape character, enhancing visual amenity, and promoting sustainable landscapes.

The Unit works with other more specialist services to the planning process such as the Biological Records Centre and the Countryside Management Service. (The latter plays a more direct role in helping manage the physical fabric of rural landscapes, and in implementing landscape change programmes, such as the Watling Chase Community Forest Project.) The Unit also works with the Chilterns Conservation Board and Hertfordshire Gardens Trust as they seek the conservation of some of the county's finest landscapes, and supports regional organisations that share similar objectives.

It may be of interest that HCC's own landscape design requirements are currently provided by long-term agreement with Mouchel TSC (for highways) and by Mace (for schemes over £100K). Consultants that have been managed by the Landscape Service over the past few years are: The Landscape Partnership Ltd; LDA Design; and Liz Lake Associates.