Enhance Heritage & Planning

25/08/2025

Standing stones aren’t just relics, they are human survival written in stone. Early communities used them to mark territory, track time, build trust, and make meaning that outlived them. Even now, they whisper the same story as we crave memory, connection, and permanence in an ever developing world. Check out our latest blogpost where dive deeper into the mysteries of Standing Stones, link in the bio.

26/05/2025

St Ives Theatre aka Kidz R Us: Early 2021 this project began with a query about roof repairs, and fast grew into a whole theatre regeneration project, led by a community of dedicated people, with Town Deal funding, creating a lasting legacy, from 30 years of Kidz R Us, performance art in St Ives for future generations to experience, learn, and enjoy. My own family were privileged to have been a part of Kidz R Us, taking part in numerous shows, and I too feel fortunate to have played a very small role helping kickstart this fabulous new chapter in the building’s history. Well worth popping in for a great coffee, pastry, or to take in a show 💃🕺

13/08/2024

Conversion of a redundant campsite shower block to a three bed family home successfully approved. Working with Graham Bennett Design, responding to former objections, and creating a workable self-build home, this project achieves a complete enhancement to this internationally protected landscape in West Cornwall.

03/06/2024

Starting the week with a pleasant visit to sites in Helston - a light visual survey at the very grand Meneage Parc (grade II), and couldn’t resist a quick glimpse of a successful housing regen project Enhance worked on in 2020/21, from concept and planning strategy, though to planning approval, now an attractive and useful addition to Helston town centre’s conservation area - implemented by the wonderful team at

29/01/2024

What's in your paint? Our heritage consultant Alfie Robinson discusses this under-considered building material in the latest Enhance blog post. The material is important to consider in historic sash windows, joinery, and other finishes on buildings. Understanding materials, their application and history is a key part of the heritage consultant's toolkit and we bring this expertise to each project. This blog post follows an article Alfie recently published in Studies in Conservation, a peer reviewed journal with an international readership.

In buildings, lead paint is historically important, but harmful. Alfie Robinson discusses its history and legislation in this blog post.

25/10/2023

Balance is key to our work at Enhance. Join Alfie as he explains our recent work on an interesting Grade II listed 18th century cottage in Gweek, which was no exception to this rule!

Alfie discusses a recent project which won success in Gweek village to bring a Grade II listed 18th century cottage back to life. Negotiation with the county council and balanced decision-making were needed along the way.

07/10/2023

The impressive looking Tregenna Castle Hotel sits high on a defensive hill overlooking St Ives like it was once a castle, but it wasn’t! Designed by John Wood the Younger (think Bath’s Royal Crescent) it was built 250 years ago as a 14 bedroomed home, then converted to a hotel by Great Western Railways when their branch-line began escorting tourists into town from the 1870s and has offered hospitality ever since.

05/10/2023

Trees Are Green 🌳

This picture came up in my feed earlier. I took it this summer in central Oxford. Upset by the lost ‘Sycamore Gap Tree’, I felt a need to share. It’s a beautiful scene and shows the capacity to live closely and care for trees even in densely populated environments. I looked for words to help convey sentiment, and found these from Auden which seem to fit.

‘The trees encountered on a country stroll reveal a lot about that country's soul... A culture is no better than its woods.’ - W.H. Auden, Bucolics, 1953

03/10/2023

A gun battery still exists on the east of The Island overlooking St Ives Bay.

The map is St Ives from around 1830 and shows the location of the historic emplacement. From 1860, the fortifications here are known to have included three guns and a barracks for soldiers to defend the town against a possible foreign invasion from the sea. The original guns were removed in 1909. Then, during World War II, the site was re-equipped with anti-aircraft guns pointing upwards to defend the town against bombing raids from the sky.

Today the gun emplacements are still in use providing lookout accommodation for the local Coastwatch station, with the barracks now housing a local surf education facility.

29/09/2023

An exceptional day! Andy and Alfie supporting the Cornish Buildings Group promote good building practices in Cornwall, seeing old friends and meeting new, also talking with lots of young people about careers in the heritage sector. Google search ‘Cornish Heritage Expo’ to find out more about this two day event celebrating Cornwall’s heritage, held in the wonderful setting of Godolphin House.

27/09/2023

I went on an archaeological tour of West Cornwall last week and discovered a portal between our physical world and the heavens. A lychgate! The name comes from old-English for ‘co**se’ and offers a traditional entrance to a churchyard, designed as a sacred space for a deceased person to be placed, for family and friends to gather for initial service and in saying farewell. Often with a roofed porch and decorated with wood carvings, these spiritual entranceways helped increase a sense of transition, giving a physical threshold into holy ground. This lychgate is at Paul in West Cornwall. It has no decorated porch, but offers a rare example showing an original plinth where the co**se was seated before passage.

…Paul church was also famously burned by invading Spanish soldiers in 1595, and the soot stained stonework can still be seen inside.

23/09/2023

A forgotten castle used to guard over St Ives town at The Island. This low promontory used to be called Pendinas, meaning ‘headland-castle’ from the pre-Roman times. Smatterings of evidence include a 16th Century ‘travel blog’ by poet John Leland referring to a castle here, and borough records in 1595 for the upkeep of fortifications and a platform to hold ‘great guns’. There’s also a faint castle ruin, just outline traces, piled stones facing west across Porthmeor Beach, and a belief that St Nicholas Chapel stands on old castle foundations. The outline of piled stone are like ‘Harrys Walls’ built as defences on the Isles of Scilly around 1550.