[Mods - I’m looking for facts based answers, but they may be opinions, feel free to move it you want]
So during the lockdown I’ve started watching some British renovation shows. I started with Grand Designs on Netflix and have now graduated to Restoration Man and other similar shows that are available on Youtube:
While I love both, I enjoy Restoration Man a little more than Grand Designs since I personally like the historical angle. However it seems the British governments are incredibly dysfunctional when it comes to fixing up old homes. I’m not even the homeowner and I want to scream at the TV in frustration at the council bullshit and approval process they put people through in every episode.
**Questionst: **
*What types of listed buildings are there and how do they become listed? *
What sort of renovation restrictions does “listing” connote? (in general)
*Why do the councils prefer to see buildings decay rather than allow owners any latitude when it comes to renovating? * (i.e.: a building was “agricultural” (storage barn) but had been derilect for 30 years and was collapsing. A family buys it hoping to convert to residential = 3 years approval process = collapsed walls = WTF?
The english “council” bureaucracy seems off-the-charts dysfunctional and Pythonesque in their absurdity. A) Is this typical of the UK?B) If so, why do Brits simply accept this level of government dysfunctionality?
For example: When dealing with the council and planners it seems like they very often contradict each other to the detriment and expense of the homeowner. For example a man wanted to put a historically consistent extension onto a 1700’s house. The planner denied it saying the extension must look visually different (i.e. modern style). So he paid to redesign etc. submitted it to the council and a year later they then deny it saying it needed to be the same as the old structure. WTF?
Another couple had to completely replace the roof due to damage (and got permission to do so), but it took the planner 4 months to get back to them with approval for the type of slate tiles they picked. WTF? How do they not just have a list of “approved historical tiles” - pick any one? Meanwhile, the place was exposed all winter and sustained big damage.
If that was the USA, in both cases the owner could / would sue the council for damages and expenses due to this, I assume that can’t happen in the UK?
First you need to appreciate just how many older structures we have in place, it is not at all unusual for people to be living in housing well over 150 years old, and not that rare for it to be getting on for 500 years old.
There is a wide feeling in the UK and Europe that historic structures are more than just personal real estate and are part of national or world heritage - the current owners are therefore guardians of that heritage, part of the conditions of being the owner of historic structures is the civil duty to protect our national identity.
Too many folk would like to live in a twee historic looking residence and soon find that these were not built to accommodate modern conveniences, from satellite dishes through to garages, so they are tempted to alter them with scant regard for the original structure.
Age is not the only criteria, it is also about the merit of a specific structure - so an example might be the Forth Rail Bridge - it is grade 1 listed which means it is of national importance, in fact this is also a UNESCO heritage site so it is considered a meaningful structure for the whole of mankind.
The other thing you will not realise is that during the 1950’s and 1960’s we lost a huge number of important structures due to redevelopment, some was based simply on greed and corruption by local authorities and wealthy individuals. This loss was so great that in some cities the whole character of the place has been irreversibly and detrimentally altered.
Context is also very important, one specific structure might not be important on its own however when taken into context with a whole district then lack of appropriateness within a certain setting can and does mean that whole streets and districts combine to create a certain invaluable setting.
…for example you might have seen shows on tv such as ‘Peaky Blinders’ where filming has taken place in certain areas that still retain much of their 1930’s architecture - well we have many places that have a collective feel from varying historic eras - think of cities such as York, Bath, Edinburgh, London, Cheltenham.
The problem is that maintaining such structures in close to historic condition is not just a matter of using modern materials an methods - which are cheaper, for very good reasons. Like any form of restoration or historic repair you have to use similar or identical materials and methods - that gets expensive and many a structure has been marred in the past by unsympathetic restoration.
Amongst the worst at building restoration - especially churches - were the Victorians who frequently took buildings apart and rebuilt them in a manner that fitted their own aesthetic view of a fantasised history instead of the reality o - an example of this is the paint applied to the Apprentice Pillar in Rosslyn Chapel which has caused irreversible damage - it was painted over with a medium that has eaten into the stonework and cannot be removed without causing even more damage.
This is why methods and materials for restoration can be very tightly specified - to prevent such tragic damage
So, in order to protect our national heritage we have a scheme where potential candidates are proposed by authorities who are charged with their protection, the applications for listing are examined and decisions are made about the level of protection. The highest category of all cannot be altered structurally however their use can be changed with consent, they might be allowed to have other structures placed within them that do not alter the original fabric.
So yes, living in a listed building is also an obligation too - but anyone who wants to buy a listed structure is made very well aware of this, and this can both increase values or decrease them. The problem lies with derelict and semi-derelict structures, it is all too easy for owner to allow important structures to fall into disrepair and then claim the need for demolition - when the owner has in effect committed a slow form of historic vandalism, this has been very common and still many such structures are suffering under the ownership of greedy individuals who value money more than anything in life - more than our national heritage.
Imagine the outcry of Her Majesty were to decide to demolish the tower of London because she could make lots of money building new office blocks!
If we do not protect our heritage then we end up looking like Japan’s cities, with little or no soul or history. Heritage is an immense industry - the value to tourism is absolutely huge and it also informs our own national character.
One of my friends from when I lived in the UK is a specialist carpenter (actually a carriage-maker) who has made a living working on listed buildings, using historic techniques and materials (to match the existing building works).
As far as council bureaucracy - that seems to be something that happens in the UK. My stepson worked in the UK for a while, checking and approving consents for the Environment agency. If he saw a consent that was nearly suitable for approval, he’d call or email the submitter and make the necessary recommendations to get it sorted. His UK colleagues would just reject the application, and leave it to the submitter to figure out why it had been rejected. He just could not understand the attitude.
I understand that, I absolutely agree. I’m not saying that is any sort of issue, I think it’s admirable. What I don’t understand why so often the “council / planning” bureaucracy seems to fight that and make it hard for people.
The episodes on TV show sincere people, not developers, who want to best respectful to history, but their local council or planners basically screw them over.
As** si_blakely** notes:
This happens all the time: “I’ve requested feedback on the rejected application and they will meet me in 6 months, maybe”. On one, they were trying to deal with British Heritage who had listed the dilapidated building to find and clearly determine what they could or couldn’t do and it was over a year for a 30 minute meeting. Meanwhile the building continued to crumble.
Well, bear in mind that the TV shows generally show matters from the perspective of the applicant who has been rejected. He tells an edited story which present the matter in the light that he would want it to be seen, and then the programme-makiers further edit it to make “good television” - which often means depicting confrontation or provoking outrage.
Don’t mistake these programmes for anything remotely like an investigation into the strengths and weaknesses of the UK’s policies and practices regarding the conservation of cultural heritage.
In Scotland it goes Category A, Category B & Category C, rather than Grade 1 etc. The Forth Bridge is Category A. I don’t know what the differences are between Scotland and England with regard to the effects of listing, but you can read about the Scottish system here: Listed Buildings | Public Body for Scotland's Historic Environment
To give some anecdotal perspective on how many buildings are listed and back up what casdave says about the number of homes that are more than 150 years old, I live in a house built in 1879 that isn’t listed. I’ve had a look at the listed buildings in the parish (as somewhat surprisingly that’s how the list works in Scotland) and there are lots of other mid to late 19th century houses that are not listed.
Making anything more than a minor change to an existing building requires ‘planning permission’. This gives neighbours and the local Authority a chance to examine the proposals and to decide if they are happy with the appearance and the way it fits with the neighbourhood. It also requires Building regulations approval which determines if the plans are structurally in line with regulations.
Listed buildings have an extra layer of protection. There are many examples of post war development which has ruined the appearance of a village street or a city centre and the regulations were intended to prevent this kind of vandalism.
As UDS says above, the producers want conflict and the participants often have a grievance to air. I have, however, seen similar programmes where English Heritage has been fully engaged and gave considerable help to the owner. It does seem that the whole process takes an interminable time, but EH has limited resources.
An important complication is that it is a two-tiered process. The main purpose of the different grades of listed buildings is to distinguish which are of local importance and which are of national and international importance. The former are (usually) a matter just for the local council, whereas the latter also require the approval of the national heritage body, i.e. Historic England, Historic Scotland etc. One reason for this is that local councils have, if anything, tended to be rather lax in applying the rules.
That’s an excellent example of how the issues are far more complex than you seem to assume. There is an enormous variety of roof slates used in historic building in Britain. The precise type varies by location and by the age of the building. Also, past repairs sometimes mean that the existing slates are a mixture of different types, so it may not be obvious which should be the ones to try to match. So the heritage authorities, such as Historic English, do publish detailed guidance on the subject. But those are necessarily rather more complicated than just a list of approved types.
Just to complicate things further, the churches of the major denominations in England and Scotland are exempt from the listing system, because those denominations have their own internal systems of regulating alterations to them. That’s why the uselessness of the Church of England in protecting its buildings has long been the constant refrain of the ‘Nooks and Corners’ column in Private Eye.
They’re meant to be buildings with some sort of significance, they’re put on a list by the Secretary of State.
You need to apply for listed building consent from the local council to make any changes to the building. Any changes to the appearance of the building may also require planning permission, to be applied for separately.
If the council don’t make a decision you can appeal to the Secretary of State, the time allowed varied but won’t be three years. Applying for a change of use (eg, to residential) would also be a planning permission issue. In this situation the council should issue an order requiring the owner of the property to maintain it.
The job of the listed building people is to protect listed structures. The planning committee people have a different job. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have different requirements. If they contradict, no biggy. Just don’t add the extension. Problem solved.
They don’t have a list of approved historical tiles, because different buildings were build with different tiles over the course of many centuries. Sometimes you need slate, sometimes you need flat ceramic tiles, sometimes you need other things, sometimes you need thatching.
If they left the building exposed to the weather, they did that intentionally, because you can seal a building against the weather without tiles. IT’s a very common problem for property owners to intentionally allow properties to become damaged, so they have an excuse to demolish.
The council is properly performing its statutory duties.
As well as stone and general construction style. I don’t know about slate but just this weekend I saw several buildings on Wikipedia and I, even though I’ve only been exposed to them through Google Maps and Wikipedia for most of the regions, could … not pin down which region the building was at based on style and color, but I was within 100 miles which isn’t bad in American terms .
For instance the Cotswolds are famous for their honey-colored stone, and if you tried to repair a listed building with historically-accurate stone from other places to replace existing light-colored stone, I’d assume you could get your application rejected.
What would it take (short of a revolution) for the citizens of the UK to effect changes in this system? This sounds like the kind of nonsense that drove the colonies to revolt. Needless bureaucrats. What if everyone in some remote “historic” village decided they wanted satellite TV dishes added to their “listed” buildings, and installed them en masse? Would the local councils send for the army to dismantle them? Isn’t it common sense that some of these structures were not designed to last a thousand years, and owners should not be forced to artificially keep them in such a state against their will. I have no problem with people who willingly want to do the kind of painstaking restorations described but by god it should not be mandated. Maybe the councils should evict all, take possession, and do all the restorations out of their own budgets, because I’m sure they don’t provide one pence towards these restorations. Indeed, these so called experts probably draw handsome salaries telling people what they can and can’t do.
I think we pretty much have an attitude that if you buy a listed building with a plan to change the use from agricultural to residential, you kind of deserve all the run-around you’re going to get, because converting a historic barn, even if derelict, to a house is pretty much what the listed building system was intended to prevent. There will be something about the barn- the construction method or some other historical aspect, which is of interest. It won’t have got listed status just because it’s old. Leaving it derelict may well be completely fine for preserving the reason for it getting listed status, while converting it to a house may involve making alterations. The push to get it listed may have been largely because locals did not want it to become a residence.
On top of the whole listed building status aspect, ‘barn conversions’ are a bit of a polarising topic here anyway. It’s very very hard in much of the country to get permission to build a residential property in the countryside from scratch. It used to be far easier to buy an existing building and convert it, which led to a whole load of farm buildings being turned into what are often pretty tasteless expensive residences, mainly by people moving away from the cities, in areas where locals were being denied permission to build homes for their families. Often, these left the absolute bare minimum of the original structure to be able to claim it as a conversion, rather than a new build. I believe the rules got tightened up a little, but it’s still easier to get permission to convert than build from new, resulting in barns shooting up in value, out of the price of locals, and the regulations on building barns also being tightened up, making farmer’s lives more difficult. This led to bad feeling in many rural areas.
It’s (I suspect intentionally) very hard to prove, but there’s a chance that, rather than simply rejecting permission, which would then need to be justified, the wannabe homeowners are instead being given a whole bunch of minor objections, which may be arcane and contradictory, but are all technically allowable under the guidelines, which are very broad to reflect the wide variety of structures which can be listed, in the hope they’ll just decide it’s too complicated, give up, and go away.
There are many historical zones and buildings in the US too, with similar arcane rules and boards. I grew up right next to one, and the people who lived in those houses couldn’t do anything to the house without approval, which was often difficult and took considerable time to get approved. And the default answer for anything that changed the outside appearance of the house was always “No”.
There certainly are some cases where the interpretation of rules can be petty and I have sympathy for people living in a building which is given listed status unexpectedly when they didn’t want it, which can happen, usually in response to a planning application for a major change to a locally popular building which causes an outcry. For the most part though, if you don’t want to be given extra rules and regulations on what you can do with your property, you don’t buy somewhere with those rules and simply expect they won’t be applied to you. It’s made very clear what the status is.
For an example of petty, near where I used to live, a farming family applied for a change of use to add a small section of one of their fields onto their garden. Normal, this would be a virtually automatic yes, but their field was part of a famous view, and the application was rejected on the grounds that it would be ‘an eyesore’. They were several miles away from the viewpoint, so the change would be undetectable to anyone not using a ruler to measure the position of their fence in the current view against the historical paintings and photographs. Somewhat unimpressed by this rejection, the farmers discovered that, while a change of use from agricultural to domestic garden did require permission, repainting the barn did not. I believe the attitude was ‘eyesore they say? I’ll give them an eyesore’ so they painted every single panel of the barn in the direction of the viewpoint a different bright colour, and a sedate brown on the farmhouse side. Nothing whatsoever the council could do about it, and you could damn well see that mess from the viewpoint without needing a ruler.
That’s interesting. During the quarantine, I’ve been watching a lot of a TV show called “Escape to the Country,” which is one of those let’s-watch-people-buy-a-house programs, the twist in this one being that it focuses on people from the cities who are moving to some rural UK county, usually because they want to retire there. The houses they look at include a lot of listed buildings, and a fair number of them are converted barns, or what were originally worker’s cottages turned into residences. One would never know from watching that there was any controversy about that. But of course, these are people just looking to buy, not to make a lot of changes.
I do have a General Question. I notice on the wikipedia page about listed buildings, that the classifications for listing in England and Wales are “Grade I, Grade II*, and Grade II.” How would you pronounce “Grade II*” if you were speaking it aloud?
That entire post is a beautiful example of how the mindset of people can vary from place to place. Foreigners often don’t have a clue what the locals are thinking.
It is a generalization, of course, but casdave explained the sense of duty to culture and history which I’ve seen in many Europeans. A typical American, in contrast, will tend to have an attitude that “I’m the king of my house and I’ll modify it however I like!” The American will often forget that he had better not buy a place which is on the National Register of Historic Places, or he’ll end up facing problems similar to those described in this thread. The big difference of course, is that the USA is so much younger that we have far few such places.
Regulations don’t happen in a vacuum. Various policies are put in place as reactions to perceived wrongs, which compound over time. Historic preservation has become, whether right or wrong, a means not only for protecting historical resources, but also a tool for NIMBY’s, worrywarts, and busybodies to enforce the ideal vision of their community. They may be a majority, or they may be a very vocal minority, but in either case, the council is doing their bidding. There’s good and bad on both sides of the table here, and it’s by no means limited to the UK or Europe. Historical and environmental review have both been coopted in the US by interests with only tangential connections to their actual goals.
Aside from that, one of the interesting idiosyncrasies of the preservation movement is that many of the policies and standards were developed at the height of modernism in the 1950s through 1970s. This is where “additions and alterations should be of their time but also compatible with the original building” comes from. The “of their time” part comes straight out of modernist theory. The idea being to not try to fool anyone into thinking something new is old, but to be true to itself. That sounds all well and good, but because of the overall tenets of modernist design, it’s often fundamentally opposed to being “compatible with the original building.” Local vernacular versus high international style are about as far apart as one can get.
That leaves nearly every possible design solution open to interpretation and the whims of a particular review board. The more modernist interpretations gave us glass and steel additions to brick buildings, and facadectomies where the building was demolished but the facade retained as a framework for the new building behind it, or as a standalone art object disconnected from its original use. These strategies have for the most part been discredited and abandoned, since they oppose compatibility and even basic integrity.
To this day there’s still no clarity on that issue. The best we’ve been able to narrow in on is that a glass and steel box is not an appropriate appendage to an historic building, nor is distressing new materials, or building walls and window slightly crooked to make it look older than it is. In between those two extremes however, it’s still the wild west.
Local councils may be a bit sluggish, but being mostly funded by central government and thus having had their budgets cut over the last ten years, their planning departments have a heavy workload and something of a backlog.
We are a small country and have a desire expressed through legislation passed by elected governments to preserve the character of at least some of it. Listed status is not some sort of arbitrary tyranny imposed from above.
Parts of our country were bombed into oblivion in WW2, losing much that was of architectural and historical interest. The listing system was introduced after the war to try to stop the developers finishing the work that the Luftwaffe had started.
Nobody buys a building that’s listed without knowing about it, and no building gets listed without a rigorous and publicly accountable process.
What we’ve happily never had are racially restricted covenants, no building has ever fallen into disrepair because it couldn’t be sold to blacks or Jews. And we don’t have home owners associations to tell us that we cant hang out our washing to dry.
No, it’s not common sense. It’s your opinion. If a majority of Brittons felt the same way they could get the laws changed, but as it is, most don’t want a free-for-all, even if they disagree with some elements of regulation and enforcement, or the decisions that affect them personally.
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