Series details: CRDA/64

Scheduled monuments

The National Monuments Record (NMR) is one of the largest publicly accessible archives in the UK and the biggest dedicated to the historic environment. It is maintained by English Heritage and is based at the National Monuments Record in Swindon, where it has public search rooms.

A schedule of monuments has been kept since 1882; monuments whose preservation is given priority over other land uses. The current legislation, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979, supports a formal system of Scheduled Monument Consent for any work to a designated monument. Scheduling is the only legal protection specifically for archaeological sites. The term 'scheduling' describes the process through which nationally important sites and monuments are given legal protection by being placed on the list, or schedule. English Heritage takes the lead in identifying sites in England which should be placed on the schedule by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Scheduling is applied only to sites of national importance, and even then only if it is the best means of protection. Only deliberately created structures, features and remains can be scheduled. The schedule now contains about 18,300 entries (about 31,400 sites). There are 1 million or so archaeological sites or find spots of all types currently recorded in England, of which perhaps less than half might qualify for consideration for scheduling as monuments.

Since the late 1980s, English Heritage has been engaged in a programme known as the Monuments Protection Programme (MPP) to review both existing scheduled monuments and unscheduled archaeological sites of potential national importance. The aim of the programme was to assess these sites against standard national criteria to produce a new schedule which would fully reflect England's archaeological heritage. The MPP was a review and evaluation of information on monuments, enabling those of national significance to be identified and recommended to the Secretary of State for scheduling.

Two additional objectives of the programme were to ensure that the records of scheduled monuments were compiled in ways which would help those engaged in case-work at English Heritage and to improve the information provided to owners and occupiers of scheduled monuments and all those concerned with consent procedures.

The MPP has now been subsumed within the designation programme of the Designation Team and its processes are currently subject to the Heritage Protection Review.

Listed buildings

The Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 provided specific protection for buildings and areas of special architectural or historic interest. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) monitored the effectiveness of the controls.

The Secretary of State then had a duty under the Act to compile lists of buildings of special architectural or historic interest. There were three grades of listing:

• Grade II buildings were of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve them
• Grade II* were particularly important buildings of more than special interest
• Grade I buildings were those of exceptional interest

Listing a building did not mean that it would be preserved forever in its existing state. It merely ensured that the architectural and historic interest of a building was carefully considered before any alterations were agreed.

In April 2005, English Heritage (rather than DCMS) became the organisation responsible for the administration of the listing system. For further information on the current listing process, see the DCMS website's historic environment page.

The compilation and maintenance of datasets within this series is the responsibility of English Heritage.

The Series comprises two significant subseries: The Record of Scheduled Monuments (RSM) (reference CRDA/64/DS/1), which is English Heritage's primary national database of scheduled monument information; and the Listed Building System (LBS) (reference CRDA/64/DS/2), which is a computerised version of the Lists of Buildings of Architectural or Historical Interest in England. For further details of these, see Links to subseries catalogues.

The Listed Building System dataset was published by NDAD in February 2006. The Record of Scheduled Monuments was published by NDAD in January 2008.

Other Heritage Protection datasets which may be nominated to join this series include the Buildings at Risk Register and the Register of Parks and Gardens.

The series CRDA/64 has been designed to accommodate future accessions and developments, by treating each dataset as a separate subseries. This approach will enable the accessioning of the future system, which is intended to incorporate the functionality and contents of both the RSM and the LBS. This approach will also bring together related datasets, and will include other records such as risk registers and landscape registers, which may be nominated for transfer in the future. This follows the accessioning requirements proposed by The National Archives.

The Heritage Protection datasets are public records under the Public Records Acts, 1958 and 1967. The National Archives has assigned the series reference WORK 93 to these datasets.

The documentation items in subseries CRDA/64/DD/7 are not Crown Copyright public records; all remaining items of documentation are public records.

The Listed Building System dataset is open without restriction.

The documentation is now fully open. The documentation in subseries CRDA/64/DD/7 comprised items which were copyrighted articles and were formerly closed for a short time, until NDAD were given clearance by the author (in March 2006) to reproduce them.

Certain fields and tables in the Record of Scheduled Monuments dataset are closed under Section 40 (2) (Personal information) of the Freedom of Information Act. These data are closed for 84 years and are scheduled to open in 2089. The same closure ruling has also been applied to certain items in the documentation collection.

The Heritage Protection datasets are subject to Crown Copyright. Copies may be made for private study and research purposes only.

All the documentation is subject to Crown Copyright, with the exception of the articles in documentation subseries CRDA/64/DD/7.

The Heritage Protection datasets are subject to registration under the Data Protection Acts. For further information, see Links to subseries catalogues.

The language of the materials is English.

System documentation relating to both the RSM and LBS datasets has been transferred to NDAD. General English Heritage publications on the Monuments Protection Programme and the treatment of Scheduled Monuments have been downloaded by NDAD from the English Heritage website, and included in the catalogue as dataset documentation. See the Dataset Documentation Catalogue for further details.

English Heritage offer a number of online resources, some of which are derived from or connected with the National Monuments Record and relate to ancient monuments or listed buildings. See, for example:

• Images of England, a photographic record of England's 370,000 listed buildings
• ViewFinder, a browsable picture library of historic images from the NMR archive
• PastScape, an inventory of archaeological sites and historic buildings in England

Many publications on the work of English Heritage are available, including publications which can be downloaded from the English Heritage website, although no publications have yet been found which use data specifically derived from the datasets in this Series.

None.

The systems within this series were developed independently. See Links to subseries catalogues for descriptions of original system attributes.

The datasets within this series were developed independently. See Links to subseries catalogues for descriptions of original structure and schema.

See Links to subseries catalogues for details of validation.

Subseries catalogues provide more detailed information about individual subseries, and are currently available for the following subseries: