Full List of current Listed Buildings

The request was partially successful.

Dear Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England,

Please could you provide me with a full list, preferably in machine readable format, of all current Listed Buildings. Ideally, this should include sufficient information to identify each building and its location, such as a brief description and a grid reference or latitude/longitude coordinates, as well as the name of the building and its listing status.

Yours faithfully,

Mark Goodge

TREVITT, Jessica,

Dear Mr Goodge

re: Environmental Information Request - Listed Buildings

Thank you for your email dated 28 February which has passed to me for
reply. As Access to Information Manager for English Heritage I have
responsibility for responding to requests for information covered by the
access to information legislation which includes the Freedom of
Information Act 2000 (`the FOIA') and the Environmental Information
Regulations 2004 (`the EIRs'). In your email you have requested "a full
list of all current listed buildings". You would prefer this in machine
readable format.

Having considered your request I have concluded that you have requested
`environmental information' and have therefore processed it under the
terms of the EIRs.

The list of buildings that have been provided with statutory protection
through the listing process is publicly available. Although there is no
exception from the disclosure of information under the EIRs that is
specifically concerned with information that is already publicly available
I am of the opinion that your request falls under the scope of the
exception provided in regulation 12(4)(b) of the EIRs. This exception is
applicable if providing the information is "manifestly unreasonable". I
appreciate that this is not the most friendly of phrasing and I would like
to make clear that it is the volume of the information concerned combined
with the fact that it is already publicly available that makes it
applicable and the public interest best served in maintaining it. It is
not that you have asked the question.

There are over 300,000 entries in the statuary list and it is therefore,
as you will appreciate, of a considerable size. It is not possible for me
to send it to you. Further information on the listing process along with
details of how access can be gained to the list is available on the
[1]Heritage Protection pages of the English Heritage website in the
section, towards the bottom of the page, entitled `Can I see the lists?'
I note that you would prefer to access the list in machine readable format
and I would suggest that you contact the Enquiry & Research Services team
at the National Monument Record Centre, the public archive of English
Heritage and one of the places where the list can be accessed. They will
be able to advise you further on how the list can be accessed and whether
or not it is possible for sections of it to be provided to you in machine
readable format. The team can be emailed at:
[2][email address].

I hope that the information that I have been able to provide is helpful to
you. If however, you are unhappy with the response that you have received
you may ask for an internal review. You should contact: Mr Mike Harlow,
Legal Director, English Heritage, One Waterhouse Square, 138 - 142
Holborn, London, EC1N 2ST

If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have
the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a
decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: The
Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow,
CHESHIRE, SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely

Jessica Trevitt

Access to Information Manager

Tel: 01793 41 4539

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Dear Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England's handling of my FOI request 'Full List of current Listed Buildings'.

Firstly, I would like to express my thanks at both the the timeliness and clarity of the initial response. However, I disagree with the decision that the request is unreasonable. The data I am asking for already exists in suitable electronic format, as it forms the basis of the search facility on both the http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk and http://lbonline.english-heritage.org.uk websites. It would, therefore, be a relatively trivial matter for someone with the necessary access to take a copy of the relevant database, either in an open format such as an SQL dump or a csv export or a proprietory format such as MS Access or Excel. Any of these would be perfectly suitable for my needs, and the size of such a file would be well within the usual limits for email.

Equally, while I am aware that any individual record can be accessed via the above websites, their terms and conditions explicitly forbid large-scale data mining. So there is no meaningful sense in which the dataset as a whole is publicly available, and it's the dataset as a whole that my request relates to.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/fu...

Yours faithfully,

Mark Goodge

TREVITT, Jessica,

1 Attachment

  • Attachment

    ListedBuildingData17Mar10.zip

    4.6M Download

Dear Mr Goodge,

Thank you for your email of 5 March in which you request an internal
review of your request for a copy of the statutory list. Your email also
included some additional information and I have therefore taken the
opportunity to look into your request further. As a result I am now in
the position to provide you with some additional information in relation
to gaining to access to the information that you have requested. I am
very sorry for the delay in responding to you.

You may already be aware that there are some datasets, including one for
listing buildings, available from the National Monuments Record (NMR), the
archive of English Heritage. I attach a compressed folder with
spreadsheets derived from spatial data and a data dictionary that are
available at the NMR. I am not however, sure how useful they will be
because you really need to load them into a map as full addresses are not
downloaded. If you do have a GIS you can register to download spatial
data directly from our website at:
[1]http://services.english-heritage.org.uk/....

While we can, in theory, provide the information that you have requested
in XML format these data are extracted at local planning authority level
and my colleagues who work with Heritage Data have estimated that it would
take approximately one day to extract the data for one local authority.
As there are 380 local planning authorities I feel that it is impractical
for us to extract it in that format for the whole country.

I do hope that the further explanation I have provided helps you
understand why I feel that it would be unreasonable for us to provide you
the information that you have requested in the format that you have
asked. If however, you are still dissatisfied with the response that you
have received to your request you should contact Mike Harlow English
Heritage's Legal Director who acts as internal review officer. I have
copied Mr Harlow into this email for his information.

Yours sincerely,

Jessica Trevitt

Access to Information Manager

Tel: 01793 41 4539

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