Conservation Management Plan for a Grade II* listed manor house.

A complex listed building requiring a strategic framework.

Nash Court is a layered building. The earliest surviving fabric dates to the late medieval period, with major phases of alteration in the Tudor, Georgian and Victorian periods, and further interventions across the twentieth century. The property’s listing at Grade II* recognises its national significance, placing it among the top eight per cent of listed buildings in England, and reflects the survival of fabric and detail across multiple historic phases.

Significance at Nash Court is not concentrated in any single period. A Tudor doorframe survives within a Victorian-altered drawing room. Georgian sash windows replace earlier mullion-and-transom openings on a partly medieval elevation. Outbuildings of mixed date frame the principal house and the historic landscape. Any approach to managing change at the property therefore needed to begin with a forensic understanding of what survives, where, and why it matters.

The owners approached Heritage Unlimited with a clear brief: prepare a Conservation Management Plan that would serve as the strategic framework for a phased programme of repair, alteration and adaptation over the coming decade. The plan needed to support both routine maintenance decisions and major listed building consent applications. It needed to be detailed enough to inform real choices, but accessible enough to be used by owners, architects and planning officers without specialist re-interpretation.

Significance assessment of medieval and post-medieval fabric.

The first phase of work was a comprehensive significance assessment, drawing on documentary research, archival drawings and on-site fabric analysis. We worked through the property element by element rather than room by room, recognising that a single space might contain features of varying date and significance, each requiring its own assessment.

Documentary research drew on county record office holdings, the Historic England Archive, and earlier survey work commissioned by previous owners. On-site analysis was carried out across multiple visits, with attention to roof structures, joinery details, plaster finishes, fireplaces, floors and below-ground evidence. Where significant features were obscured by later finishes, the plan flagged them as areas requiring investigation rather than presenting an artificially complete picture.

Significance was recorded against the four-value framework set out in Historic England’s Conservation Principles: evidential, historical, aesthetic and communal. Each principal element of the property, internal and external, was assessed and graded, with vulnerabilities recorded alongside. The result was a document that allowed the owners to see, at a glance, where significance lay, how robust each feature was, and what was at risk.

A working policy framework for future change.

The CMP’s central function is forward-looking. The significance assessment is the foundation, but the document’s value lies in the policy framework built on top of it: a set of conservation principles tailored to Nash Court against which any future proposal can be tested.

The framework was developed in consultation with the owners and the local planning authority. It addresses, among other matters:

• Routine maintenance and repair, including specifications for like-for-like materials
• Treatment of medieval and Tudor fabric, including thresholds for intervention
• Approach to internal alterations affecting historic plan form
• External alterations, energy efficiency upgrades, and the threshold for listed building consent
• Setting and curtilage, including landscape and outbuildings
• Future use and adaptation, including the framework for assessing major proposals

The framework is deliberately specific. Generic conservation policies are easy to write and impossible to apply to a real proposal. The Nash Court framework instead sets out, for each element of the building, what change is acceptable, what is not, and what would require detailed justification.

A document the local authority and the owners both use.

Two listed building consent applications have followed the adoption of the CMP. Both were prepared by Heritage Unlimited and both have been granted, with the Conservation Management Plan submitted as a supporting document on each occasion. The local conservation officer has confirmed that the plan is referenced directly in case files when proposals at Nash Court are assessed.

The plan also functions as the working maintenance document for the property. Routine repairs are now scheduled against the vulnerabilities register, materials specifications are drawn from the policy framework, and any proposed change is tested against the CMP’s principles before being committed to.

The most useful test of a Conservation Management Plan is whether it survives its first contact with a real proposal. The Nash Court CMP has now done so on multiple occasions, and continues to be the document of reference for the property’s heritage management.