Estates/Trust

LHSA Estates/Trust

Somewhere between the LHSA Listings, the LHSA Advisory, and the LHSA Foundation, will lie the LHSA Estates and/or Trust. There is a need for a responsible organisation to take over the management of valuable Heritage Landscapes that are either in trouble or want to take their Heritage Landscape further.

English Heritage was established after the Second World War to prevent the devastating loss of prime heritage properties that were either falling apart, damaged during the war, or being abandoned by the change in circumstances of aristocratic families and the changing economy. In so doing, many great estates were saved and have endured to this day.

There is no such body in South Africa or the region that we are aware of, and there is a strong tendency to consider only buildings as having any heritage value. Until now, properties and estates in distress either remain that way, deteriorate, decay and are destroyed by vandals, or rescued by the private sector.

While this might seem like a big stretch for an embryonic organisation, it remains a worthwhile goal and a hedge against desperate times and situations. Too much of our heritage is simply abandoned when owners can no longer afford the upkeep, valuable buildings simply collapse and are lost, and a society begging for housing and job opportunities are left as helpless, when there seems to be a better place for them than just another township or informal settlement.

A new way of seeing our forgotten infrastructure - think railways - and dying gardens, estates or urban fringes, even our very own traditional rural homesteads and villages, that will revitalise our societies and carry forward our successfully of Landscape Heritage needs to be found.