Every listed building in the United Kingdom on one map: 465,740 entries on the four national lists, from cathedrals and castles to telephone boxes and milestones. Where are they thickest? What gets listed? When were they built, and when did someone decide they were worth keeping?
Somebody decided each of these was worth keeping. Since the late 1940s the four nations of the UK have kept lists of buildings of special architectural or historic interest, and a listed building cannot be demolished or much altered without consent. Each list is published as open data: Historic England's National Heritage List, Cadw's list for Wales, Historic Environment Scotland's list and Northern Ireland's Historic Buildings Record. Put together they hold 465,740 entries.
An entry is not always one building. A single entry can be a whole terrace, a church, a farmhouse with its barn, a gravestone or a milestone. And the four lists were made by different people with different rules, so a Grade II building in Kent and a category B building in Fife are not quite the same thing. With those cautions, here they all are.
Zoomed out, the map is a portrait of where the country was busy before the twentieth century: thick across lowland England, in the old towns and along the valleys, thin on the uplands and in places that grew up later. Zoom in and each town resolves into its streets: a market place ringed with dots, a church with its churchyard tombs, a farmhouse with its barns. Switch to "Per head" to see counties by entries per 1,000 residents, or to "Built" to see Wales and Northern Ireland, where every entry has a date, by century.
Wales has the most list entries per person of the four nations (9.5 per 1,000 people), then Scotland (8.4), England (6.5) and Northern Ireland (4.8). Among the 218 counties and unitary authorities, the Isles of Scilly lead with 56.5 entries per 1,000 residents and the City of London follows (43.5); both have very few residents. Among places with more people, rural Wales and the English Marches stand out: Powys (40.7), Gwynedd (34.8), Rutland (33.9) and Herefordshire (30.8). The fewest per head, among places of 100,000 people or more, are in Barking and Dagenham (0.18), Newham and Brent: outer London and towns that grew mostly in the twentieth century.
By sheer number, Devon has most (19,176), then Kent (17,341) and Essex (14,002). London's 33 boroughs hold 19,371 between them, 2.1 per 1,000 Londoners; Westminster alone has 3,788.
Towns tell the same story at a finer grain. Among the 890 built-up areas in England and Wales with 10,000 or more residents, the most listed per head is Ludlow (40.7 per 1,000 people), followed by Sherborne, Whitby and Monmouth: small old market, port and cathedral towns. Among villages and small towns of 1,000 to 10,000 people the counts go higher still: Aberaeron has 194.0 entries per 1,000 residents and Beaumaris 143.3. Among towns of 50,000 or more, Bath leads (23.7), and Barking and Dagenham has the fewest (0.17).
The lists do not have a shared "type" field, so I read each entry's name with a set of open keyword rules (a "Barn at Lot Farm" is a barn; "The Bull Public House" is a pub). The rules give a type to 31.4% houses and cottages, 6.8% barns and farm buildings, 6.2% walls, gates and railings and 6.7% churches and chapels. A further 17.7% are numbered street buildings whose name is just an address, and 8.6% have names that do not say what they are ("The Laurels").
The top grade is a different world. Of England's 9,341 Grade I entries, 54% are churches and chapels; in Wales 39% of Grade I entries are. Parish churches are the backbone of the top grade, and in England's sample 31% of listed churches have a first date before 1500. Wales's Grade I is also 17% castles and defences. Scotland's category A (7.5% of its list) is led by houses (25%), with churches only 12%.
The grades are not used alike. England gives Grade I to 2.5% of entries and Grade II* to 5.8%; Wales gives Grade I to 1.6%. Scotland's three categories are spread differently: A 7.5%, B 49.6%, C 42.9%. Northern Ireland uses A, B+, B1 and B2; A is 2.4%.
None of the four open datasets has a "date built" field except Northern Ireland's. The date is in the words: each entry has a written description that usually starts with it ("Farmhouse. Late C17." or "1845, by Robert Dodds"). I read every one of Wales's 30,110 Cadw descriptions, a random sample of 5,000 of England's entries and 2,000 of Scotland's, and took the first date each one gives. Rules found a date in 98% of England's sampled descriptions, 96% of Scotland's and 98% of Wales's.
The listed UK is mostly Georgian and Victorian. In England's sample, 31% of dated entries were built in the 1700s and 33% in the 1800s; 18% in the 1600s and 6% before 1500. England's list is the oldest of the four. Wales has a similar share from before 1500 (6%) but far more from the 1800s (56%); Scotland is younger again (65% from the 1800s) and Northern Ireland's record youngest of all (74%).
Inside England the difference is east and west, old and new. The East of England has the oldest listed buildings: 10% from before 1500 and 14% from the 1500s. London's are the youngest, 56% from the 1800s, and the North West's next (46%).
A warning about the very oldest dates. The first date in a description is usually the build date, but for old churches it is often the date of the site: Welsh descriptions open with a saint's foundation in the 600s, or a Roman camp, before saying that the present church is medieval. I skip a first date whose sentence speaks of a foundation or a site when a later date follows, but some remain, so I do not crown an "oldest listed building" from these rules. In England's sample the earliest dates belong to churches with fabric from before the Norman Conquest, such as St Mary's at Bampton in Oxfordshire (C10). For the oldest buildings still standing, see my earlier study Still Standing, which maps every building in Wikidata dated before 1100.
Listing has come in waves. In England, 23% of today's entries were first listed before 1970, 47% in the 1980s, when the lists were resurveyed parish by parish, and 4% since 2000. The busiest single year was 1987, with 34,953 entries. Scotland's busiest year was 1971 and Wales's 1998; 24% of Wales's entries were listed since 2000.
The newest listings tell their own story. Of the 5,682 entries England has listed since 2015, 2,889 are war memorials, more than half, as the centenary of the First World War prompted a push to protect them.
Lists. Historic England's National Heritage List for England (listed building points, 379,683 entries), Historic Environment Scotland's listed buildings (46,749), Cadw's listed buildings for Wales (30,110) and the Department for Communities' Historic Buildings Record for Northern Ireland, keeping only listed grades A, B+, B1, B2 and B (9,198; 6,683 "record only" and delisted entries are left out). All were read from the publishers' own open data services on 2026-10-29.
Types. Keyword rules in code/rules.py read each entry's name: the head of the name (before "at", "to", "of" or a comma) is searched for words like barn, church, kiosk or bridge, and the last such word wins, since English names end in their head noun. Northern Ireland's record gives a use, which the same rules read. As a check, Wales's list has its own broad class for each entry: where the rules gave a type, it was consistent with Cadw's class in 71% of 18,631 entries (77% leaving out walls and gates, which Cadw often files under the house they belong to). Read the types as a good guide, not a census.
Dates. I read the description of every entry in Wales, a seeded random sample of entries in England and Scotland, and took the first date each description gives: a year ("1845", "c1800") or a century ("Late C17", "18th century"). A century alone is placed in its middle; "early" and "late" move it by 35 years. Where no number appears, a period word (Georgian, Victorian, medieval) is used and flagged. The first date is normally the date of the main build; older parts often come later in the text, so these dates lean young for buildings with long histories. The text is not republished, only the date and the words it came from. To test the rules I read 120 random descriptions (60 from England, 30 each from Scotland and Wales, as part of the AI-assisted analysis): of those that could be judged, the rules put 97.4% in the right century (3 wrong), and two of the three errors were then fixed in the rules. Wikidata's inception dates (23,851 entries) fill in some others on the map, marked as such; they lean towards old and famous buildings.
People and places. Counties and unitary authorities: ONS December 2023 boundaries and mid-2025 estimates (with NRS and NISRA). Towns: ONS built-up areas (2022) and Census 2021 residents. England's regions: each entry takes the region of its nearest census area.
Limits. An entry can cover one milestone or a whole terrace, so counts are of entries, not buildings. Grades differ between nations. Buildings demolished or delisted are gone from today's lists, so the listing waves are of survivors. A few points are placed at a grid reference rather than on the building.