54 listed buildings, 1 of them Grade I

Mountnessing WindmillGrade II* listedIngatestone Railway StationGrade II listedThe Bell InnGrade II listed28 and 30, High StreetGrade II listedGeorge and DragonGrade 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.

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.

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. 32 came in 1976, 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.

Ingatestone has 54 listed buildings, 1 of them Grade I, including Church of St Edmund and St Mary. Only 86 of the 914 towns nearest its size have more Grade I buildings. On High Street alone there are 20 listed buildings. Its older streets lie in 2 conservation areas, the first designated in 1969.

Of the whole list, 78% are houses, terraces and villas. More than half went on the list in a single year, 1976: 32 of 54. The rest is about typical: per resident it sits near the middle of UK towns; Henry Petre (1884) was born here before 1900; and 15% of its homes were built before 1919, close to the 15% in the typical UK town.