A protected view or protected vista is the legal requirement within urban planning to preserve the view of a specific place or historic building from another location. The effect of a protected view is to limit the height of new buildings within or adjacent to the sightline between the two places so as to preserve the ability to see the landmark as a focus of the view. The protection may also cover the area behind the place or building concerned.
For example, in London views of St Paul's Cathedral are protected from various prominent locations around the city. In Edinburgh, a 2005 skyline study compiled a list of almost 170 key views which will now be protected in the planning process.
Protected views are not unique to the UK, also existing in places such as San Francisco which has some of the strictest limits in the world; Portland, Oregon where the size of downtown blocks is kept low to maintain the views of Mount Hood from the West Hills; and the city of Vancouver which has protected "view cones".
Read more about Protected View: Protected Vistas in London
Famous quotes containing the words protected and/or view:
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)