These are designated buildings and structures "of special architectural and historic interest," much more diverse that the typical tourist destination, or Stately Home that Noel Coward sang about.
Listed are just under 500,000 man-made structure that survives in something at least approaching the original state. Most structures on the list are buildings. Others are bridges, monuments, sculptures, war memorials, and even milestones and mileposts.
In England and Wales buildings of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important are rated as Grade I, about 2.5% of all listings.
Grade II* constitutes particularly important buildings of more than special interest, about 5.5% of listed buildings. Reydon Hall, childhood home of the Susanna Moody and Catherine Parr Trail, shown in this image from Library and Archives Canada, is Grade II* listed Grade II buildings, 92% of all listed buildings, are nationally important and of special interest, the most likely grade of listing for a private residential building.
The grading system is different in Scotland.
www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/ is an online database where you can browse for listed buildings by country, county and parish/locality. Each has official listing data, you can view the location on a map, and, where possible, see it in Google Streetview and Bing Birds Eye View. Some have added comments, information and photos submitted by users.
There's also a search page but be aware that geography in the site is in some cases, shall we say ... creative.
An online resource that I have found particularly useful, as in this example:
ReplyDeletehttp://direcleit.blogspot.com/2010/12/horsacleit-lodge.html
All the best,
Peter
Not directly related to this post, but of possible interest to those interested in architecture is this site:
ReplyDeletehttp://archiseek.com/
From its home page:
"Archiseek.com is an Irish architecture website covering interesting and important buildings from the past as well as latest developments and news. We encourage discussion in our forums from non-architects."
Although "Irish", its interests seem to be wider. I have recently seen material on Vancouver, St. Paul Minnesota, and UK.
In its search box try "heritage" (without the quote signs). The search is a bit slow,-have patience.