Harlow has 168 statutory listed buildings and 26 locally listed buildings.
Listed buildings
A building is listed when it’s of special architectural or historic interest and thought to be of national importance and worth protecting.
Buildings get listed by the Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport after recommendation by Historic England. We don’t have the power to add or remove buildings from the list.
You can search all listed buildings on Historic England.
If you want to carry out any work on a listed building, you will need to apply for specific planning permission, called listed building consent.
Harlow’s statutory listed buildings schedule (pdf)
Local list
We also keep a register of locally listed assets. These assets can include buildings, structures and places such as important statues, war memorials, churches, phone boxes or former banks.
Assets on the local list are ones which do not meet the criteria to be listed by the Secretary of State, but are recognised for their local historic or architectural value.
We make sure planning applications relating to locally listed assets take account of their special character.
We plan to update our local list every 3 to 4 years, or if we receive a large number of nominations outside the nomination period, we may make an interim update.
Harlow’s local list 2013 (pdf)
Updating the local list
The current local list from 2013 only includes buildings and is due to be updated, so we launched our Harlow Heritage Nominations campaign.
We asked you to nominate your favourite historically important assets to possibly be included on the local list. Nominations are now closed.
We will now score all the nominated assets using a bespoke scoring matrix, publish the results and then produce a shortlist. There will then be public consultation to get your views on the shortlist of assets. Subject to responses received, we will then use the shortlist to produce the updated local list.
We will use a scoring matrix which awards points for architectural, aesthetic, archaeological and historical, cultural and social interest. Not all the categories may be relevant for all the assets nominated.
The matrix includes appropriate weighting to make sure that culturally and socially important assets are not penalised if they do not have great aesthetic or architectural interest.
Full results of the scoring, including details of nominated assets which did not score highly enough to make the shortlist, will be published on this page.
The number of nominations an asset receives is not relevant because it is its heritage value, rather than popularity, which determines its suitability for inclusion on the local list.
Planning permission for listed buildings
In addition to planning permission, you’ll need to apply for listed building consent if your house is a listed building and you want to:
- demolish it
- alter or extend it in a way that would affect its character
You may also need listed building consent for any works to separate buildings within the grounds of a listed building.
If you are unsure about the permission you need for the work you want to carry out, you can contact us.
You will definitely need listed building consent if you want to:
- add an extension
- remove historic doors, fireplaces, plasterwork or panelling
- replace external doors or windows
- paint the outside of the property
- demolish all or part of property, including anything in the grounds
- carry out repairs that would involve changing the fabric of the building or using different materials
Apply for listed building consent
You can apply for listed building consent on the Planning Portal website.