Protecting heritage with overlays
Local councils must identify and protect heritage places by law. Heritage experts identify places of heritage significance in Moreland. Council protects these places and areas with Heritage Overlays.
What is a heritage overlay?
A Heritage Overlay conserves and enhances heritage. An overlay shows how your land can be used and developed. All heritage overlays are recorded in the Moreland Planning Scheme. You can view heritage overlays in Moreland at the Moreland Planning Scheme online.
Heritage overlays and precinct overlays
Heritage sites are identified and protected in two ways – by a heritage overlay applied to an individual site, building or object or by a heritage overlay applied to a broader precinct area.
Some individual heritage overlays can have controls that require you to get a planning permit to make changes inside a building, paint a building and to remove, destroy, prune or lop a tree on the site.
A place with its own heritage overlay is an important heritage site.
Most heritage sites do not have their own individual heritage overlay. Instead they are identified and protected within a heritage overlay control that applies over a wider precinct area that may include all the houses in a street or group of streets.
A heritage precinct overlay can also include places with no heritage value. These places have a heritage overlay so that new development does not have a negative impact on the heritage significance of the whole area.
Council has heritage studies that record the heritage significance of the heritage precincts as well as individual places. You can ask to see Council's heritage studies at the Moreland Civic Centre.
Does my home or building have a heritage overlay?
The Moreland Planning Scheme online lists all individually listed heritage sites and all properties in a heritage precinct overlay. You can also contact Council’s Urban Planning Branch to see if your home or building is a heritage site or is located in a heritage precinct overlay.
