ABSTRACT
We have already seen how the Ministry of Health and its successors allowed the enactment of successive Planning Acts from 1909 to 1932 to pass without offering any advice or guidance to local authorities on the provisions relating to buildings of special architectural or historic interest. With the post-war Acts, brief explanatory notes were issued but it was not until the first Planning Bulletins were published in 1962-63 that the MHLG had anything to say on the subject; and then only briefly and in the context of town centre redevelopment (see chapter 11). This habit of restraint in official pronouncements was to change dramatically over the next twenty years, when circulars proliferated and the thin stream of advice on conservation became a flood.
