Into the past
Despite having lived in the Highbury area of London for a few years I realised I did not know what my local historic buildings were.[1] It’s not that I didn’t have suspicions on what they might be, but these weren’t based on any actual direct knowledge.
To address this I created an Android mobile app using the publicly available information on listed historic buildings in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The idea being to link the phone’s location to the information on the buildings to see where and what they are. Some details on how the app works are here.[2]
There are, at least for Apple, other apps out there, but to my knowledge this is the only one covering England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (The nations of the UK have separate listing systems) and the Republic of Ireland. It is possible to add in other countries too.
Trying to write about 1000s of buildings is though simultaneously overwhelming and a bit abstract. I therefore want to follow a trail past local buildings going back over 400 years from suffragette arsonist activism, through the Victorian expansion of London, to before the fire of London and ending in the (first) Elizabethan era. Showing what came back and what I learnt from the list descriptions shown in the app screenshots below.
Parochial means ‘of this parish’ for a reason. The point of this app-led perambulations around local streets is only partly to highlight these buildings. The area may be unique, but it is not necessarily that unusual - although the two oldest buildings are, at least in London terms, quite rare. In microcosm these buildings illustrate why we designate certain buildings (or structures) for protection. How we experience them and how they give meaning to us.
The burning post box (1913): Pillar box by junction with Highbury Grove - Grade II
To my surprise when I first tested the app I found that my nearest listed building was not a building but a post box from the 1860s/70s. A time when very few Londoners had a
vote and the city had no electric lighting. There are three listed examples of this older type of post box in the area. From the list description of the box on the corner of Highbury Grove I learn
that it was found on fire by a postman on the 30 January 1913. From November 1911 Suffragettes had been attacking post
boxes usually at night. In the 1918 the franchise was partially extended to women with full voting equality attained in 1928. 
The Number 1 (1860s): Former Church of St Saviour - Grade I
Down the road from the burning box is my nearest Grade I listed building: The former Church of St Saviour. Grade I is the highest grading rating in England and only about 2.5% of English listed
buildings
have this rating. Built around the same time as the postbox (1865-66) in a neo-gothic style. It illustrates another aspect of listed buildings in that the use has changed and St Saviour’s is
no longer a church, has spent a period as an arts centre and is currently up for sale. 
The pre-fire building (1658): 52-55 Newington Green - Grade I
A few streets over from the retired St Saviours is a building I have walked past many times incorrectly assuming like much of the area it was built in the 19th century, when it is actually
originates from 200 years earlier. 52-55 Newington Green is another local Grade I, which is one of London’s oldest residential buildings dating from 1658 a few years before the great fire of London
in 1666.
Two Marys: The old (1563) and new church (1858) of St Mary - Grade II*
Walking north on Albion road for about 15 mins from Newington Green brings one to two Grade II* listed buildings with the same name. In one case travelling back another 100 years to 1563 and the
reign of Elizabeth I when the parish church of St Mary’s built. The Grade II* rating corresponds to 5.8% of listed buildings in England. From the list description we learn that there was at some point a suspicion among the congregation that the
old church might be pulled down and converted into school rooms when the new St Mary’s was built in 1858. The new church’s architect was the same as the St Pancras Station while the old church was
restored by Pugin one of the architects
of the House of Parliament.
Back to the future
This is just a very small excursion into the listed buildings of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. In contrast to national collections in museums, listed buildings are a public collection that we all, at least externally, have access to without necessarily knowing at least directly of their existence. This is also a collection that although not uniformly distributed is intrinsically decentralised. Using technology to provide more local information on their location and history is therefore a natural way to engage people with them.
It has to be said that many of the list descriptions of the buildings are not accessible to a non-architect. I certainly don’t know what ovolo mullion, and quite a few terms mentioned, referred to mean. That the building descriptions are often not that accessible is understandable as they were written to technically describe the building for listing and often would have been written at a time when it would not have been easily possible to make the list information public. This illustrates an opportunity in providing a summary for the general public as well as the technical description. We can see the improvements that are already being made in this. The post box was designated for the design. The historic context on its incineration was added in 2018 on the 100th anniversary of when women were first given the vote.
A next stage in the app project is to use AI to process the list descriptions to allow the app to show the information of most interest to the general users. If you have an Android phone and would be interested in testing it, discussing and/or adding in public data on another country’s historic buildings get in touch.
References
Historic England’s listed buildings site
[1] The football Highbury not the fictional Jane Austen Surrey one
[2] Currently the list descriptions in England, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland are accessible.