74 listed buildings, 1 of them Grade I

Parish Church of St AndrewGrade I listedThe Old ForgeGrade II listed77, High StreetGrade II listedThe Coachman InnGrade II listedColne PrioryGrade II listed+3See all photos

Photos from Wikimedia Commons and Geograph, copied to our own server, each credited to its photographer with its licence; names open the building’s page or its official list entry.

c. 1904

Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons, copied to our own server. Each credit opens the image’s page with its full description and history.

Historic England lists buildings in three grades: Grade I for buildings of exceptional interest (about 2.5% of all listed buildings), Grade II* for particularly important buildings of more than special interest (about 5.8%), and Grade II for buildings of special interest (about 91.7%). Listing protects the whole building, inside and out.

Every entry on the National Heritage List for England whose point lies inside the ONS 2022 built-up-area boundary. One list entry can cover a terrace or a group of buildings.

High Street14 listed

Burrows Road3 listed

Colne Green3 listed

Lower Holt Street3 listed

Of the 74 entries, 24 are named by a street address; the rest are named buildings such as churches, halls and bridges.

Historic England’s conservation areas layer, supplied by councils (incomplete in places, so a page fact, never graded). Hectares are the part of each area inside the built-up area.

The first 4 entries were listed in 1952. 42 came in 1987, in the national resurvey of the 1970s and 80s. Only 0 have been added in the last 15 years.

Two measures, each ranked against every UK town of 1,000 or more, with protected heritage counting twice as much as the age of homes. Protected heritage counts each listed building by its grade (Grade I three points, II* two, II one), each scheduled monument and battlefield two, and each registered park or garden by its grade; it is ranked both per 10,000 residents and as a total, so a village with one fine church doesn’t outrank a historic city. The second measure is the share of homes built before 1919, from the Valuation Office Agency’s council tax records. History is a character grade: it describes the town and isn’t part of the overall grade.

Per resident, Earls Colne has more listed heritage than 85% of UK towns. All told, the list holds 74 listed buildings, 1 of them Grade I, including Parish Church of St Andrew. Only 95 of the 1,164 towns nearest its size have more Grade I buildings. On High Street alone there are 14 listed buildings.

A conservation area has protected part of it since 1969. Most entries on the list, 80%, are houses, terraces and villas. The big year was 1987, when 42 of the 74 went on the list. The rest is about typical: Thomas Audley, 1st Baron Audley of Walden (1488) was born here before 1900; and 21% of its homes were built before 1919, close to the 15% in the typical UK town.