Instead of looking at Hampstead Heath as a series of outdoor compartments ('Character Areas') we have drawn a line around the edge of The Heath and described it as: "a piece of countryside encapsulated in the heart of the city". It is not a park or a designed landscape, so it needs to be considered in a different way.
This has unlocked years of angst and tension between different users who can now recognise that the Heath is a place where multiple activities can co-exist and that its biggest asset is as a huge open space with access to the sky.
Working with the City of London we put together a series of ‘working groups’ to build the project. Members of the groups included professional consultants, committee members and lay public who had expressed concerns. It was a highly effective way of disseminating complex but subtle concepts of why management decisions might be made in a particular way.
The Heath was not designed as a park, and it is not a ‘heath’ because most of the sand and gravel has been quarried out and replaced by woodland. It isn't a 'natural place' because it has been interfered with by man for centuries. But it has regained a naturalness since being ‘saved’ in the 19th century. It is fantastic to think that Constable used to spend his summer holidays here 'skying' – making sketch studies of clouds.
