What Was The First Listed Building Registered In England?

The designation of a listed building is a huge event that has ramifications not only for the owner of a particular building but also for the community as a whole.

It is typically a point of particular pride; if a building is listed, it means your home, office, or other building is of such significant cultural, architectural or historic interest that it is on a public register to ensure it is protected for future generations.

However, with this pride also comes some degree of responsibility and stewardship to protect the building for future generations. It also requires some specialist work to maintain and restore heritage features if they do get damaged.

The ultimate benefits of protecting England’s architectural heritage, and the journey the concept of conservation took to get to the first ever listed building, is as illustrative a demonstration as it gets to the reasons why conservation is needed so much.

The Anti-Scrape Movement

It remains somewhat remarkable that preserving architectural history is a relatively recent invention, but English heritage as we know it today is less than a century old, and it took another half century to reach that point.

There were three main inciting incidents that led to the development of a robust heritage listing system.

The first was the activism of William Morris, who was one of the first public figures to speak out against what he saw as harmful restoration.

In the Victorian age, several buildings were “restored” to a somewhat fictional standard inspired by earlier English Gothic movements of the 13th and 14th centuries, much to the horror of Mr Morris and other influential figures such as John Ruskin.

They saw these “restorations” as highly destructive and idealised “forgeries” that caused permanent damage to the original building, and established the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) as an early advocate for heritage as we understand it today.

This helped to establish early “anti-scrape” legislation, named for scraping the unoriginal plaster that had been added to old buildings and revealing the historic stonework beneath. However, this only protected ancient monuments.

Disposable Heritage

The second and third major steps came between and following the two World Wars of the 20th century, where the limitations of the old laws meant that the law could not stop over a thousand country houses from being destroyed.

The Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882, also known as Lubbock’s Law, was not focused on protecting private property, which meant that the owners of country houses could demolish them and heavily modify them as they liked.

The First World War fundamentally changed society in the UK. By the 1920s, the landed gentry were on the decline, meaning that their large country houses were a tax burden with no benefit. By 1955, a country house was demolished every five days.

The Blitz also led to a lot of country houses either being demolished, defaced or permanently altered in the name of the war effort, and the near-destruction of St Paul’s Cathedral was the final straw.

Protecting Gosfield Hall

The first building to be protected by the listed building provisions of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was Gosfield Hall in Essex.

A Grade 1 listed country house, it proved to be the exact kind of historic 16th-century building at considerable risk of wanton destruction. It had been used as a military base during the 1940s, but following the war, it had been abandoned.

The listing spared it from destruction, as whilst its history since then has been somewhat chequered, a vital and beautiful part of British history has endured ever since.