I am delighted to launch A Living Tradition - A Strategy to Enhance the Understanding, Minding, and Handing on of Our Built Vernacular Heritage. This strategy is important because it seeks to address the continuing loss of buildings, features, and settings, and the erosion of building traditions and skills. Popular attitudes to our built vernacular heritage range over the gamut of emotions, from negative associations with difficult times, to nostalgia and, more recently, real enthusiasm. Looking afresh at this heritage, with its venerable building traditions, will, I believe, enhance our sense of identity as a people, as well as encourage the continuing use of vernacular buildings, settlements, and landscapes as viable, attractive, and distinctive places in which to live and work.