Heritage at Risk.
Designated heritage assets whose condition is at risk through neglect, decay or vacancy. Sensitive, viable reuse is actively encouraged — these are the sites where heritage and development interests most often align.
- Sensitive conversion to a viable use
- Repair-led schemes securing the asset
- Carefully justified enabling development
- Bringing vacant heritage back into use
- New build in the asset’s setting
- Interventions affecting significance
- Density to fund repair (the enabling test)
- Subdivision and change of use
- Harm beyond what repair requires
- Demolition by neglect strategies
- Enabling development failing the tests
- Over-development justified as “viability”
The Heritage at Risk Register, maintained by Historic England with local authorities, flags designated assets — listed buildings, conservation areas, scheduled monuments and more — whose condition is poor or declining. The policy aim is to secure each asset’s "optimum viable use": the use that funds its repair and keeps it in good condition with the least harm to significance.
Because the alternative is continued decay, decision-makers weigh proposals here differently. NPPF allows the deteriorating condition of an asset to be taken into account, and enabling development — additional development that would otherwise be refused — can be justified where it is the only way to secure an asset’s future, subject to strict tests.
Heritage at risk is the constraint most likely to work in a developer’s favour: the policy goal is to find a viable use, so a well-evidenced repair-led scheme is pushing at an open door.
The cases that fail are the ones that over-reach — claiming more enabling development than the conservation deficit justifies. Open-book viability and a genuine optimum-viable-use case are what win consent.
How schemes actually fare inside this designation — approval rates, appeal survival, which authorities apply it hardest — needs the designation joined to the decision record. That join isn’t built, so those figures aren’t published here. We won’t estimate them.
The Atlas maps the Heritage at Risk register against INSPIRE parcels. Find at-risk assets where sensitive reuse could unlock a scheme.