Independent Heritage Advice in Sydney and Melbourne is essential

Securing sound, unvarnished specialist advice from a heritage consultant working across Sydney and Melbourne can be the difference between a development application that stalls and one that delivers a positive outcome for people, place, and community.

Working with places of cultural heritage value calls for informed advice, creative thinking, and a practical understanding of contemporary heritage management systems.

We should be grateful for Australia’s cultural heritage laws and policies. They are hard-won. They let us identify, conserve, and use places of cultural significance, tapping into their inherent sustainability, their stories, and the social and economic value that often follows when historic places are cared for and kept in play.

Sydney and Melbourne: similar stakes, different rule-books.

Touring the Past provides heritage consulting across Sydney and Melbourne, and more broadly across New South Wales and Victoria. The underlying conservation logic is shared, but the statutory machinery is not. In Sydney, heritage questions frequently arise through the development assessment system for heritage items and conservation areas, and through approvals affecting State heritage places. In Melbourne (and across Victoria), heritage is commonly navigated through planning scheme controls such as the Heritage Overlay, alongside separate State processes for places on the Victorian Heritage Register. Same planet, different gravity.

In both cities, heritage regulation has become a potent force in planning and development. If you want to change something in, on, or sometimes near a place of heritage value, the consent authority will usually expect you to address impact with care, not vibes. That means grappling with significance and how it is expressed: fabric, intactness, integrity, condition, history, spatial planning, views, setting, use, authenticity, and community attachment. These factors don’t arrive one at a time, either.

Achieving a timely and positive outcome (for your project and for the heritage place) requires good-faith engagement with conservation principles, as expressed in the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, better known as the Burra Charter (rev. 2013). What that means in practice is not always obvious, particularly in a field shaped by site-specific judgement, differing statutory approaches, and shifting design fashions. Heritage places are also quite often stubbornly peculiar. That is part of their charm, and part of the challenge.

Thankfully, heritage management has moved a long way from the preservationist maxim attributed to Adolphe Napoléon Didron: ‘In no case must anything be added and, above all, nothing should be removed.’ The contemporary aim is informed, managed change.

Realising that aim in Sydney and Melbourne is not always easy. Development pressure is real. Expert views can differ in good faith. Regulatory interpretations vary, and heritage outcomes are often resolved through professional judgement rather than purely mechanical rules. That is exactly why independent advice matters: it helps separate the genuinely risky from the merely unfamiliar, and it gives you a defensible rationale for change that respects the place while meeting present-day needs.

The advice we provide ranges from brief, targeted site assessments through to complex, multi-stage master planning and approvals support. The first step is simply to ask.

How can we assist?

Touring the Past provides professional built heritage advice. We start by establishing the specific heritage significance under scrutiny, and the ways that significance is carried at the place (and within its setting). That foundation gives us a workable context to test the feasibility of your aims, identify genuine constraints, and find the parts of a proposal that can move without breaking what matters.

In doing this, we deliberately avoid simply regurgitating the ‘do’s and don’ts’ of a development control plan or generic policy statement. Those instruments matter, but they are not infallible, and they are rarely a substitute for place-based reasoning. Our view is simple: decisions about heritage places should be grounded in a precise understanding of their significance, not reduced to compliance theatre. For most reasonable contemporary needs, solutions and mitigation strategies exist.

Our advice is informed by best-practice international and national guidance, real-world examples of good contemporary work in historic settings, broad project experience, and the (sometimes messy, but useful) body of heritage reasoning that emerges through tribunal and court decisions over time.

When you are working in or around heritage places, the best move is simple: get advice early. It can save months of rework, sharpen the design logic, and keep the approvals pathway realistic.

Frankly independent

When you engage us, it is important to understand that we will not act as an unthinking advocate. The most useful thing we can deliver is a third-party, evidence-based assessment.

We have an ethical obligation to assess the likely heritage impact of proposed works against established significance. Doing otherwise wastes your time and resources, and risks baking avoidable problems into a design that will later be forced to unpick itself under pressure.

Independence does not mean indifference.

We can still engage meaningfully with your aspirations and constraints. It just means we tell you the truth early, and we help you shape an outcome that has a realistic pathway through the approvals maze.

We are always happy to discuss your project. Get in touch.

Repetition, texture, and shadow—a façade designed to read differently every hour.