IF YOU arrived in 1974 as Winchester City Council’s first conservation officer with no clear guidelines as to your role, and a budget of just £2,000 to support not only an historic city but also its extensive rural district, it would take your breath away – rather like this sentence.

Andrew Rutter explained how he developed the role and the area, carefully. He began with the big thing – replacing the old Winchester bypass. The engineers wanted to turn this into an eight-lane horror of noise and pollution along the Itchen Valley. Andrew used drawings to persuade the council otherwise which is why, after a long stalemate and increasing jams at those traffic lights, we now have the M3 extension and peace in the water meadows below St Catherine’s Hill.

Again drawing attention to its visual impact, Andrew scotched Winchester’s inner ring road. On a smaller scale, he showed how saving some old cottages next to the Globe would preserve an important landscape. Trees too were in his brief – if those in Cathedral Close were too large, shouldn’t they be replaced by smaller ones rather than pollarded (murdered)?

And why not plant on the hills around?

Interiors too are important but often not recognised.

Andrew cited a Victorian church in Jewry Street, unappealing both to look at and to worship in, but with a significant interior.

How it was not auctioned for redevelopment but renovated to become a thriving community church with Grade II status showed the conservation officer’s true role. That negotiation between developers and preservers, financiers and councillors is now mainstream must be due to people such as Andrew and, judging by house prices reached in Winchester today, pretty successful too.

At our next meeting, at 8pm on Thursday, May 26, in North Waltham School, Richard Tanner will use the school website to give “A history of maps” with Bob Clarke showing us some of his collection of local ones. Visitors welcome at £2.