The ten most important buildings in England
The head of English Heritage picks the 10 buildings that have changed the face of the country
1. Westminster Abbey (c.960)
Coronation church and mausoleum, Westminster Abbey has been a royal foundation since the 960s, and money was lavished on it by successive monarchs.
Although only a few Saxon fragments survive, it was here that Edward the Confessor developed the style that we call Norman. It was also here that Henry III began his lavish Gothic rebuilding, a project that continued, after his death, for nearly three centuries. The nave today demonstrates the rich taste of English medieval monarchs and their masons, with large-scale sculptures and carved and painted heraldic shields.
The abbey set the standard for aspiring builders for centuries.
2. Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire (1147-67)
Rievaulx Abbey is England’s most beautiful ruin. Deliberately built in a remote valley by Cistercian monks, it was originally a virtually self-sufficient community.
Like 839 other monasteries, friaries and nunneries, Rievaulx was suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s, but its remote position meant that much of its stonework still stands. It is easy to forget what a big role monasteries played in medieval society, and the Cistercian houses of Yorkshire were responsible for developing a style of building with pointed arches that we call Gothic.
This spread to become the dominant architectural style of Britain for 300 years.
3. King’s Bench Walk, Temple, London (1677)
In James I’s London, a new type of house was developed. It was then known as a “row house”, but today we call it a terrace. These houses, built of brick from the 1620s, became the backbone of the city after the Great Fire of London.
Not many early examples survive unaltered, but the pattern developed in the 1670s became the blueprint for a huge proportion of urban housing even today. Uniform on the outside, but individualistically decorated within, in many senses they encapsulate the characters of the people who lived in them.
4. The Peckwater Quadrangle, Christ Church, Oxford (1707)
Although Inigo Jones and a small group of other architects in the 17th century had conceived buildings that were rigorously faithful to ancient Roman buildings, it was not until after 1700 that patrons and architects became obsessed with designing buildings using the ancient orders of architecture precisely. An early example of this was the courtyard built at Christ Church by Dean Aldrich in 1707-14 to house rich undergraduates. The courtyard was a startling new look, and when the style was taken up by the circle of the royal court, it was adopted for houses, public buildings and churches everywhere.
5. Ditherington Flax Mill, Shrewsbury (1797)
During the late 18th century, British manufacturers revolutionised the production of cotton, using machinery powered by waterwheels. By 1800, there were 900 cotton mills employing 400,000 people. Vast new mills were built — but there was a problem. Brick and timber construction was vulnerable to fire, and many mills lit by oil or gas burnt down.
Ditherington Flax Mill was the world’s first incombustible iron-framed building. It was also the ancestor of every large building with a steel frame today, from supermarkets to skyscrapers.
6. A&G Murray Mills, Ancoats, Manchester (1801)
Britain’s industrial revolution entered a new phase after 1830. Instead of waterwheels, new coal-fired steam engines were used to power both the mills and other new types of manufacturing. As Britain became the dominant power in the world, success was built on urban factories. A&G Murray’s mills were the first in which manufacturing processes were all powered by steam. Started in 1801-2, these hulks look, at a distance, like a Georgian street, but behind the iron casements, they drove the largest economy the world had ever seen.
7. Liverpool Road Railway Station, Manchester (1830)
The world’s first passenger railway station is a modest but reassuring-looking building. Reassurance was at the forefront of the minds of the early railway engineers and architects: both passengers and investors needed to believe that railways were safe and profitable ventures. Avant-garde engineering mixed with reassuringly familiar architectural styles created an atmosphere of confidence.
8. No 6 Slip, Chatham Historic Dockyard (1847)
After the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy became the most powerful fleet in the world. Underlying its power were its dockyards, huge state-owned factories with thousands of workers.
Naval engineers pushed the limits of technology to build and equip the Navy, and one of the most important advances was the construction of massive free-standing iron sheds called “slips”, under which ships were built.
These were the first wide-spanned metal structures in the world.
9. All Saints, Margaret Street, London (1849)
It was at a church, rather than at an industrial site, that architecture and engineering first fused to create a new language for the Victorian era. William Butterfield saw the possibilities of coloured and engineered brick for making modern buildings that were both decorative and functional.
Subsequently, this polychromatic brick style was adopted by house builders and came to dominate Victorian streets all over the country.
10. Bedford Park, London (from 1877)
Sir John Betjeman, the poet and admirer of Victorian architecture, called Bedford Park the most important suburb in the Western world. He was probably right, in that the easy mix of brick-built semi-detached and detached houses in wide streets with deep gardens became the aspiration of millions. The houses that looked back to the 16th and 17th centuries were individually designed and carefully built, but used a very limited stock of motifs.
Such suburbs — and cheaper imitations of them — were built all over England from the 1880s.
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