Within the following pages you will find information about the World Heritage Site (WHS, or Site), why it is important, and what obligations apply to the planning applicant or developer when submitting an application or pursuing pre-application advice.

Managing development in and around the World Heritage Site

What is development?

Development within, and adjacent, to the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site will change towns, villages and the wider landscape.

Development may be large housing or industrial developments, or minor changes such as an extension to a home. Development can be undertaken by major developers or individuals.

Such development will change our environment – it can be positive, negative or neutral in heritage terms and very often a mixture of these.

This section of the website has been created to introduce the World Heritage Site (WHS) and to explain why it should be protected and how this is to be done.

The following pages address the importance of the WHS, and how its important features can be identified, and looks in detail at the information available for you to do this.

Photos and maps are included to illustrate the important features of the WHS, and an Impact Checklist has been added to provide a quick way to establish whether a development will have an impact upon the Site’s special qualities.

For those who require specialist planning advice, the World Heritage Site Office provides a dedicated advice service, and details and the charges for this can be found on the Pre-application advice page.

Positive development within the World Heritage Site

This guidance will help you gain a basic understanding of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, which can help you identify potential design issues at an early stage.

You will also gain a clear understanding of what makes your development site important to the WHS.

Ideally negative changes should be avoided, and this is usually possible through careful design based on a clear understanding of what makes the development site important to the WHS. For some locations, it may be considered that development should not be pursued due to the harm this would cause to the WHS.

The guidance below will help you revise your development, where necessary, to avoid negative change, and may also inspire positive design choices, which, in turn, make a positive contribution to the WHS.

The attributes can be found, in different concentrations, across all ten Areas of the World Heritage Site and part of the role of the World Heritage Site Office is to help identify attributes which are considered to be most in need of conservation and to work to secure external funding to enable this.

Significant conservation of attributes of Outstanding Universal Value has taken place since the World Heritage Site was inscribed by UNESCO in 2006 and we have highlighted some of these projects below.

Previous projects

Conservation projects have delivered significant improvements across the World Heritage Site, through preserving historic mine sites and via streetscape improvements to historic buildings within former mining settlements. A total of £92m has been allocated by funders across 52 individual projects to December 2019, with this being secured using World Heritage Site status as a principal means to persuade funding partners.

To give an indication of the type of conservation the World Heritage Site Partnership Board has supported since 2006, we have highlighted some of the projects which have appeared in the newsletters of the World Heritage Site. The authors concerned are thanked for their contributions which have been edited in some instances for inclusion within the Projects page. 

Further information on conservation can be found within the World Heritage Site Management Plan 2020-2025 Appendices - Appendix 2: Monitoring Report.  

While World Heritage Site status was used as a primary justification for the conservation works, the projects were funded and delivered by a wide range of organisations at the local and national level, including local authorities, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Natural England, and the National Trust.

The World Heritage Site Partnership Board extends its sincere gratitude to all the funders, project managers, conservation builders, heritage advisors and others, that have worked to preserve the Site’s Outstanding Universal Value for present and future generations.

The conservation projects are listed below and please scroll down to learn more. 

• (2008-2016) The Camborne, Roskear and Tuckingmill Townscape Heritage Initiative
• (2015) King Edward Mine workspaces open for business
• (2015) Wheal Busy: Scheduled Monument conservation
• (2013) Completion at Consolidated Mines
• (2012) ‘Heartbeats’ in the capital of Cornish Mining
• (2011) Devon Great Consols and the Tamar Valley Mining Heritage Project
• (2010) Theatre and song at South Hooe Mine
• (2009) Conservation at Wheal Trewavas
• (2008) Holman’s No.3 Rock Drill Works
• (2007-2008) The Geevor Project

The ongoing co-ordinated management of the World Heritage Site is a process reliant on the successful collaboration of a range of stake-holding partners.

The World Heritage Site includes three local authority administrative areas - Cornwall Council, West Devon Borough Council and Devon County Council - and is governed by a Partnership Board, comprising local authority elected members, officers, and others. The management agreement adopted by the governing members of the World Heritage Site Partnership Board can be seen here.

Further information on the Partnership Board and the World Heritage Site management structure and operations are set out within the World Heritage Site Management Plan 2020-2025, please see the links below.

World Heritage Site Research

Research is also undertaken in support of the management aims and objectives of the World Heritage Site and some of the most recent, including the Ecological Audit, can be viewed via the links below.