Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I live in a Grade II-listed house in a historically important, but somewhat down-at-heel town on the UK’s east coast. I love it; it has sash windows, a little cast-iron boot scraper set into the wall next to the front door, and someone’s name scratched on to the rear window in a 19th-century cursive. But it is hard to keep warm, and when we first moved in the roof leaked. Living in a heritage property means a responsibility to look after a piece of architectural history. But it’s a privilege that occasionally feels like a Kafka-esque nightmare. We had to apply for permission to overhaul our leaky roof. The local heritage officer initially suggested that repairs would not be permitted, as our home would no longer be in keeping with the rest of the terrace: presumably because it would not be leaking. Thankfully, the local planning officer overruled, seeing that repairs would help keep the house standing. Today, as the country’s housing, energy and climate crises reshape the way we inhabit and think about properties, the question of how to manage the country’s historic buildings is more complex than ever. What does conservation mean in a matrix of crises? And how do we balance responsibility for the past with the needs of the future? Britain has the oldest housing stock in Europe. In England alone, around 20 per cent of all housing was built before 1919, and more than 400,000 buildings are on a protected conservation list due to their architectural and historical significance. While housing on this list makes up only about 2 per cent of the country’s housing stock, 2.8mn homes are within conservation areas with a separate, additional set of rules for how to look after them. For many, it can be very hard to make — often urgently needed — changes to your home. And they are needed. A 2020 survey by Tado found that a UK home with an indoor temperature of 20C and an outside temperature of 0C, loses on average 3C after five hours, three times more than the average German home. Continued reliance on gas boilers not only makes homeowners particularly sensitive to price spikes or supply interruptions, but makes meeting the UK’s 2050 net zero climate targets incredibly challenging. The system of “listing” buildings in the UK was started by the government during the second world war, so that churches and other important, mostly pre-1750, buildings could be monitored for damage. The list was drawn up by 300 architects. In 1947, the Town and Country Planning Act gave statutory power to the list. The late 1960s saw its first survey completed, and then another in the 1980s. Today, government body Historic England’s listed buildings can be Grade II, II* or I, with Grade I designating a building “of exceptional interest”. Inclusions range from landmarks such as London Bridge to a 19th-century urinal in Westminster. But beyond these more systematic efforts, the expansion and management of what counts as a heritage building has been more piecemeal. In 2019, Historic England published a report by Matthew Saunders, former secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, who had been commissioned to review the system. He acknowledged the “vital role of listing in protecting this country’s architectural heritage” but described the uneven coverage and detail in the listings in terms of geography, architectural style and time period. “Examples of the deficiencies are legion,” he wrote. So what purpose does listing serve today? And who decides whether a building should be protected? And what does “protected” mean?Ian Morrison, the director of policy and evidence at Historic England, emphasises that the body is not about preservation but conservation: “It is about making sure we manage change sensitively.” The body makes decisions about which buildings are added to the list. But the final decision lies with the secretary of state. A common misconception is that Historic England approves or denies applications for improvements or repairs; this is in the hands of local planning authorities: bodies that are increasingly under-resourced. The risk is that buildings fall into a state of disrepair and they then need even more work doing to them . . . [but] if we don’t do this work, people won’t be able to live in these buildingsHistoric England’s own survey of local authorities in a 2024 report reveals the extent of the resourcing crisis: between 2006 and 2018 the number of archaeologists and conservation specialists working for local authorities decreased by 35 per cent and the spending on heritage-related development control by 57 per cent. While for some, owning a listed building can seem like a nightmare of bureaucracy and expense, for others it carries a cultural cachet. There is a healthy market for architecturally important and historical houses, although in most cases both purchase and maintenance come with a premium. Academic and architecture critic Matthew Lloyd Roberts described the dilemma as simply a question of “How much money are you going to spend to improve the comfort and retain the aesthetics of your listed house?”“Having a listed status doesn’t put buyers off,” argues Georgia Grunfeld, acting head of appraisals for specialist estate agencies The Modern House and Inigo. Opportunities for sensitive renovations can be a selling point: “These houses are often appreciated for lower carbon footprint repairs too,” says Grunfeld. “Vernacular building materials, like traditional lime render and paint, wool insulation etc, can often be sourced in surprising proximity.” In the context of both the climate and housing crises, there are some bigger questions to ask about the importance of building conservation. While the number of listed houses is relatively small, it draws attention to the wider value of reusing and adapting existing buildings.The best way to conserve historic buildings is to adapt them and keep them in use, says Rachael Owens from the National Retrofit Hub: “The risk is that buildings fall into a state of disrepair and they then need even more work doing to them . . .[but] if we don’t do this work, people won’t be able to live in these buildings.” Most listed houses are maintained by their occupiers rather than heritage bodies: Morrison says that Historic England is trying to avoid “an environment whereby it is too difficult for people, then historic buildings become less attractive. Obsolescence is the thing we need to avoid the most.”In February last year, 59 per cent of local authorities told Historic England they were seeing an increase in retrofit casework relating to historic buildings in the past year. In a separate survey, more than half of people living in historic buildings told Historic England they were planning a project to adapt their home to improve energy efficiency in the future. Historic England has provided the public with resources intended to make this process easier on the Your Home section of its website. It makes the case that if “properly designed and maintained”, heritage buildings can provide better energy efficiency than many would expect, because they are “designed to work with their environment”. There is much innovative work being done to adapt historic buildings for the present day. Two of the winners of Architects’ Journal’s 2024 Retrofit & Reuse Awards stand out. Led by specialist firm SPASE Design, Grade I-listed Athelhampton House was turned from a leaky kerosene and oil-fuelled stately home into a building with zero energy bills. Sensitively integrated breathable insulation in the floors and ceilings helped, but most was achieved through the installation of air-source heat pumps, solar panel arrays and battery storage. Of course, this is only possible if you have the land and capital to accommodate this scale of renewable energy generation — and the ancient yew hedges to hide it all behind. The Old Chapel presents a very different approach. Here Tuckey Design Studio recycled materials from the site and elsewhere including reclaimed timber and terracotta tiles to reduce waste and opened up the building to promote circulation and natural ventilation. It encapsulates a “fascinating dialogue between old and new, maintaining the rich patina and history of a place in preparation for a new purpose,” says project lead Elena Aleksandrov. But again, these kinds of projects are not always an option for many people’s budgets. Historic England says it wants to remove some of the additional fear and cost about modernising. In 2024 it released an advice note setting out best practice for the adaptation of historic homes, designed to support local authorities in making decisions that balance heritage and environmental impact. And historic buildings do not need to be handled with kid gloves, says Anna Hollyman, co-head of the Regenerative Places Programme at the UK Green Buildings Council (UKGBC). Those that survive tend to be robust. “Because of this they can be moulded and remoulded: basically the epitome of ‘long life loose fit’”. The phrase comes from a prescient speech made by Alex Gordon, then president of RIBA, in 1972. He proposed that good architecture is designed to be later adapted. This important principle today is encouraged by bodies such as UKGBC, which advocates for conserving and adapting buildings to prevent unnecessary damage to the environment.Saunders writes in his 2019 report that “historic buildings and monuments . . . do as much to define this country as its democracy and language”. But which buildings are deemed architecturally significant enough to be worth protecting is as contentious an issue as how they are protected. Social housing has been a flashpoint for debates about the listing system in recent decades, says architecture critic Owen Hatherley. Take the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, a Modernist building that became Grade II*-listed in 1998. A rare modern addition to the list, the development was completed in 1961 and is an internationally important example of the “streets-in-the-sky” style of architecture, with wide decks connecting flats at the upper levels. But despite the high level of protection afforded by the listing, the local planning authority approved plans that included the gutting of three flanks of the building for transformation into luxury apartments. For Hatherley this plan meant “almost destroying the entire building — as if it were only the frame that was listed”. Historic England thinks differently, and holds up the Park Hill site as an exemplar project. “From our perspective, the buildings have been successfully repurposed without losing their primary architectural significance,” says Morrison. The Twentieth Century Society argues that the listing criteria is not fit for purpose, because it favours older buildings over more recent ones: the government’s guidance on selection states that buildings less than 30 years old “are not normally considered to be of special architectural or historic interest because they have yet to stand the test of time”.“One big flaw in the current system is that there is no mechanism for looking at the buildings ‘coming of age’ each year,” says the society’s director Catherine Croft. According to her, the majority of cases in which a recommendation to list is overruled by the secretary of state are for postwar buildings, and these decisions are often “influenced by lobbying from owners and swayed by arguments which go beyond . . . architectural and historic value” — factors such as cost of redevelopment or local regeneration.Hatherley critiques society’s broader approach to old buildings. The work at Park Hill, and the renovation of other notable social housing blocks, such as Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, may preserve the building’s physical form, but they do not conserve their original purpose of providing housing for low-income families. Hatherley argues that if there were a choice between maintaining the use of a housing estate and protecting its architectural value, he would err towards the former: “At least it is doing this thing that we as a society need. But instead, it is decided that we need architectural trinkets.”Within the heritage list there are curious inclusions that hint towards conservation that surpasses architectural value: Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s childhood homes, for example. McCartney’s is a modest 1949 council house of the quality that the postwar Labour government encouraged; Lennon’s a more middle-class dwelling built in 1933, an example of Arts & Crafts-influenced 1930s housing with lead casement windows. Neither would have been protected by a listing had it not been for their residents, but this good fortune means examples of more “ordinary” housing — arguably every bit as important to our social and architectural history as grand villas and churches — have been conserved. The Beatles’ homes are examples of what Leanne Tritton, one of the founders of the campaign group Don’t Waste Buildings, called “journeymen buildings”. The group refocuses the question of conservation to something altogether more fundamental — waste. The thrust of its argument is that if Britain is to meet the 2050 net zero target, it cannot afford to knock down buildings. This is because of embodied carbon; the climate warming emissions that have already been expended in a building’s construction. The UK Green Building Council reports that 20 per cent of the carbon emissions attributed to the built environment in the UK come from embodied carbon.Should we, therefore, be more stringent with protections? Perhaps not on a basis of architectural merit but of environmental conservation. Demolishing a leaky old house and replacing it with a highly insulated one is not necessarily a net gain for the environment: the carbon emissions that went into the original building’s creation are essentially wasted. “Historic societies are really good at protecting historic buildings but Don’t Waste Buildings is about the unloved,” says Tritton. “It just makes no sense to pull them down unless you absolutely have to.” The Don’t Waste Buildings campaign presents a new way to approach old buildings which is at once more revolutionary and more pragmatic — it hopes — than the current one. When facing down the challenge of updating ageing housing stock, one could be forgiven for seeing the wealth of heritage buildings in Britain as a burden. Or protecting their architecture as an obstacle. But perhaps the answer lies in seeing the historic built environment as a starting point for modernisation: heritage not as holding back the future, but its foundation.Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
