Listed Buildings in UK, British Architecture, Architects, DCMS News

Listed Buildings in England – British Architecture

Buildings in Great Britain – DCMS Updates

20 Sep 2013

Listed Buildings in UK

UK Listed Architecture News

Four constructions built between the 1950s and 1980s have been given Grade II or II* status on Friday by the government, reports The Guardian today.

Gravesend Civil Defence Bunker, Kent
1954
The earliest of the buildings is a Civil Defence Bunker in Kent. It was in use until 1968 and its 35 staff would have formed a command centre in the event of a Soviet air attack. Now restored and open to the public, it has been protected at Grade II more for its rarity as a surviving artefact of the era than for any particular aesthetic merit.

Moore Street Substation, Sheffield
–
English Heritage argued that the brutalist style of the substation on Moore Street in central Sheffield was suitable for its Grade II listing. It is a key symbol of the city’s postwar reconstruction. Another example, the Park Hill housing estate, was listed in 1998 in an early, highly controversial mark of official approval for Brutalism.

Renault Distribution Centre, Swindon, UK
1980-82
A cherished II* listing for this bright yello Hi-Tech warehouse building designed by Sir Norman Foster. The building featured in the James Bond film ‘A View to a Kill’.

Capel Manor House, Horsmonden, Kent
1971
The final new listing, given a II* rating, is a building designed by Michael Manser.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport also revised from Grade II to II* the Catholic Church of English Martyrs in Wallasey, Birkenhead, built in 1952.

While the listing of postwar buildings is fairly long-established – the first was the Bracken House office block in London in 1987 – only 690 have thus far been chosen, less than 0.2% of the entire register.

Capel Manor House Guest Pavilion, Horsmonden, Tonbridge
Ewan Cameron Architects

image from architects
Capel Manor House Guest Pavilion
The brief was to design a guest pavilion comprising 2 bedroom suites that would sit adjacent to an Italianate orangery from 1860, on the grounds of Capel Manor House, an iconic modernist pavilion designed by Michael Manser in the late 1960s.