Strategic Information and Planning Advice

Worcester City Council established a formal archaeological advisory service in 1990, with the appointment of Dominic Perring to the post of Archaeological Officer. Charles Mundy replaced him in 1991, and the present writer took up the post at the beginning of 1997. Prior to 1990, archaeological advice had been provided to the City by Hereford and Worcester County Council, and by the City's own museum staff.

The creation of the post led to a rapid strengthening of archaeological policy and practice within the city. Worcester's Planning Policy for Archaeology and Development was first published in July 1990, just before the national publication of the Department of the Environment's Planning Policy Guidance 16 (Archaeology and Planning). It was replaced by enhanced policies in the Local Plan for 1991-2001 (the Deposit Version was published in 1994, and the plan was adopted in 1998). The Local Plan is currently under review. In its turn, the Local Plan is supported by Supplementary Planning Guidance (Archaeology and Development), first published in 1994, and revised and updated in 1999.

A full archaeological response to development is now standard practice in the city, and this is reflected in the variety and quantity of the work reported here. What the reports below do not fully reflect is the parallel achievement of preservation of significant amounts of the city's archaeological heritage in situ, largely through negotiation on foundation design. The Sites and Monuments Record for the city centre is now being enhanced in preparation for the Worcester Urban Archaeological Strategy project.

The City Sites and Monuments Record was first established as a separate record in 1978, and now comprises nearly 3000 records. Over 700 of these are archaeological and other recording events. These will form the core of the Urban Archaeological Database (UAD; Baker and Dinn 1999), a computerised record which will combine a Geographic Information System and a relational database to provide a powerful tool for archaeological information storage and retrieval. The process of systematic collection of archaeological data, which began with the work of Barker (1969a) and Carver (1980a), will with this project reach fruition. The challenge for the next decade will be to make the fullest use of the information in planning, education, research, and all the other fields which the historic environment can touch.

Integration of our understanding of Worcester's past has been an important theme during the 1990s, exemplified by a paper published in the journal Antiquity (Baker et al 1992) which draws on historical, geographical and archaeological evidence to produce a model of the development of the settlement from the late Roman to medieval periods. The framework for this study was largely drawn from a Leverhulme research project which is due for full publication during 2000 (Baker and Holt, forthcoming); this analyses the historic plot pattern in the city centre and medieval suburbs as a product of (largely medieval) town planning and land allocation. The model produced by this research underpins most of the archaeological work undertaken in the city centre during the late 1990s.