28 CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 ALFIE ROBINSON Where is the data on listed buildings? Ever since the 1940s, the missing data in Historic England’s list of buildings has represented a considerable missed opportunity in terms of historical research and policy analysis. The total number of listed buildings in England is a mystery. Estimates vary from around 400,000 to upwards of 800,000.There are many reasons behind this gap in our knowledge but, whatever the explanation, this is a major hole. Richard Griffith pointed to the problem in an article in 2010. ‘If a health service was unable to identify the number of patients it was handling, and could only suggest that it appeared to be “somewhere between 500,000 and 895,000”, then a reasonable person might conclude that its management was negligent,’ he wrote. ‘It is appropriate to ask why similar criticisms should not be levelled in the case of listed building control’.1 The total number of listed buildings is just one data point. It may not be all that interesting on its own, but – let’s use an architectural metaphor here – it is a keystone of data. This is because statistical analysis of the list can not be done with any accuracy until we know the total number of buildings that are at stake. Let’s say we want to know how well represented 17thcentury buildings are in the list at large. Even if we can extract a number of 17th-century buildings from the list, we have no idea what total to divide the number by. If we want to know in what decade after 1947 the biggest chunk of the list was recorded, we will also draw a blank, lacking an adequate total. We can trace this problem back to the origins of the list, when the Town and Country Planning Act was drawn up in 1946–1947. The act happened in the wake of the second world war and fundamentally changed the relationship between building work and government. It was a landmark of legislation, and the resources of the country were beyond stretched when it was first carried out. In this context, it is understandable that the nation did not want to spend its money and time philosophising about what exactly a ‘building’ entails. But this is something that should have been done. To have legally protected buildings put on a list, one needs to be clear on what a ‘building’ really is. This is another point made by Griffith. In some cases, the list considers an individual unit within a terrace to be a distinctive building, but in many cases it does not. In other cases, buildings with completely different functions and external walls (such as a detached water mill) are listed under one entry. The lack of consistency here is the seed of the problem we still find ourselves saddled with. Clusters of individual buildings, sometimes 20 individual units, sometimes more, are housed under individual list entries. When multiplied over a data set in the region of half a million points long, this generates the huge margins of error discussed above. 1 Richard Griffith (2010) ‘Listed building control? A critique of historic building administration’, Cultural Trends, Vol 19, No 3 Terraced housing can be covered by single entries, such as Bath’s Cavendish Crescent and Royal Crescent, but not always.
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