Lens, mirror, window: interactions between Historic Landscape Characterisation and Landscape Character Assessment

Contemporary wisdom holds that landscape research requires cross-disciplinary collaborations, and consideration of character has been seen as one way to achieve this, yet character-based methods of landscape assessment incline towards unidisciplinarity. This is the case in the UK, with two parallel methods in use since the early 1990s. Both have become influential across Europe in the drafting and implementation of the European Landscape Convention. This paper, a contribution to a special issue of Landscape Research, focuses on one of the methods, Historic Landscape Characterisation (carried out mainly by archaeologists and heritage managers), and compares it with Landscape Character Assessment (used by the landscape architects and geographers) to examine the concepts of both landscape character and interdisciplinarity. It concludes that although a single integrated method for landscape assessment could be desirable, there remain benefits in having separate methods, and the process of combining parallel landscape assessments can bring research benefits.