Many historic cities towns and villages are disfigured by gap sites, such as corner buildings removed in the 1960s to improve sight lines or others demolished simply to create carparks. Many towns have unsightly strips of neglected land created by now abandoned attempts to move back building lines and widen roads. Elsewhere derelict corners abound because modern buildings have been constructed to a grid leaving messy strips of irregular paving and abandoned landscaping. These wounds need to be healed sensitively with a programme of imaginative infill buildings and, on smaller sites, attractive planting on the model of, for example, the successful pocket gardens and churchyards in the City of London. When the Heritage Lottery Fund's recently launched Local Heritage Initiative (LHI) is extended to urban areas it could become an excellent scheme for enabling local communities to tackle some of these projects. The Urban Task Force recommended establishing a £500M Renaissance Fund with similar objectives. The Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions could take up that idea by pumping funds into the LHI to enable it to fund many more, and more ambitious, projects.

English Heritage has recently completed an excellent urban framework study of Borough Market in South London, designed to ensure that development there works with, not against, the area's extraordinary character. There is a need for more studies like this, undertaken either by English Heritage or local authorities and local partnerships, with funding from central Government.