South East Farmsteads Character Statement

This working document presents a summary of the historic character, significance and issues for change for traditional farmsteads across the south east of England, followed by illustrated guidance which aims to identify and help assess their historic character and significance in the field.

It uses the results of recent research and also the production of Farmstead Assessment Guidance across Kent and with the High Weald and Kent Downs AONBs. This has now been refined and simplified as a Farmsteads Assessment Framework, which acts as a management and planning tool to help identify the character, significance and potential for change of farmsteads. Farmstead and Character Statements for each of England's National Character Areas have also been drafted.

All these documents use a consistent terminology for describing farmsteads and their building types (set out in further detail in the National Farm Building Types document), which will allow users to identify and apply standardised indexing to farmstead types and their functional parts. This new thesaurus will be of use to Historic Environment Records and it is hoped to anyone involved in the recording of farmsteads.