Understanding Places of Worship

Some of those buildings are historic and we may be able to help with the special legal, practical and funding issues older buildings raise. Other communities may have plans to build new places of worship and Historic England may be consulted about planning permissions and consents for those. To help us find out more we undertook a various programmes of work with partners to explore buildings associated with:

• Buddhists
• Sikhs
• Muslims
• Hindus
• Jains
• Zoroastrians
• Ba’hai
• Quakers

Research on places of worship

There are nearly 15,000 listed places of worship and 45% of Grade I listed buildings are places of worship. A large number of these reflect the significant amount of medieval churches owned by the Church of England. Some of the later periods of church buildings, chapels and other faith buildings are less well represented in the statutory lists and we are working to address this gap.

Historic England is working to understand the significance of faith buildings across the spectrum of faith groups. This work will help us better understand these buildings and help others understand what matter about them.

We are currently focusing on the following areas of work:

• 20th century places of worship
• Places of worship of world faith in England
• Roman Catholic church heritage
• Nonconformist heritage including: Chapels of England, Quaker meeting houses leading to listing of key examples
• Historic interiors of places of worship, including work on significant Victorian architects JL Pearson and GE Street. Work on various individual church fittings, pews and liturgical arrangements can be found by using these as search terms in the Research Report Series database page 
• Places of worship and their setting
• Understanding challenges in managing and caring for places of worship, such as major parish churches