ABSTRACT
The word ‘heritage’ has become a very capacious portmanteau. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882 listed twenty-nine monuments in England and Wales (plus twenty-one in Scotland and eighteen in Ireland).1 It was the first such statutory list. Today there are some 15,000 scheduled monuments in England, over 500,000 listed buildings, and over 9,000 conservation areas. English Heritage estimates that there are about 600,000 archaeological sites, and a new inventory is being compiled. The statutory lists include, along with buildings of architectural distinction or historic significance, such items as dog kennels, lamp posts, bollards, stiles, pillar boxes, telephone kiosks, railings, fences and grave watchers’ huts. English Heritage is also compiling lists of listable post-World War II buildings, historic gardens and battlegrounds. In recent years the popular concept of ‘the heritage’ has been extended to cover an enormous variety of buildings and artefacts that bear little or no relationship to the traditional statutory term ‘buildings of special architectural or historic interest’.
