The Origins Of The Listed Building System

How many listed buildings exist in the UK?

Amazingly enough, there is no actual answer to this, as even Heritage ngland has noted that whilst there are 500,000 entries on the National Heritage List for England (NHLE), many of them cover multiple rows of houses, and others cover specific parts of one notable graded building.

The system, which affects the types of listed building restoration projects that can take place to maintain the particular special character of a structure, has three grades depending on the level of importance:

Grade I buildings, which are often major landmarks or historically critical buildings.

Grade II* buildings, which are of especially important interest

Grade II buildings, which have important historical characters and make up the majority of the list.

The earliest foundations of a greater focus on preservation came about with the works of John Ruskin and William Morris with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB).

Whilst concerns about the preservation of architecture were not new, and in fact, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of the most successful and acclaimed novels in history had preservation as its central theme, SPAB was one of the earliest groups to take action to help protect the character of old buildings.

Mr Morris, in particular, advocated for the repair of buildings rather than an idealised reconstruction of an old building as it was in a previous age, which he saw as destroying its history.

It would take until the Town and Country Planning Acts of 1944 and 1947 for the listing system to take shape, as a result of concerns about the cultural heritage of many cities that had been lost due to the Blitz.

Since then, several changes to the philosophy, listing criteria and transparency about the list itself and its guidelines have formed, and a growing number of people have had their say about what buildings should be preserved as living pieces of history.