83 listed buildings, 1 of them Grade I

Church of St. AndrewGrade I listedBeaconsfield House Including Railings and Gateway in Front.Grade II* listedLittle LondonGrade II* listedQuorn HouseGrade II* listed

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.

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.

Of the 83 entries, 41 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 15 entries were listed in 1951. 57 came in 1977, in the national resurvey of the 1970s and 80s. Only 1 has 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.

Measured per resident, Hingham has more listed heritage than 90% of UK towns. All told, the list holds 83 listed buildings, 1 of them Grade I. Only 89 of the 1,389 towns nearest its size have more Grade I buildings. On Market Place alone there are 17 listed buildings.

A conservation area has protected part of it since 1978. Most entries on the list, 82%, are houses, terraces and villas. The big year was 1977, when 57 of the 83 went on the list. Otherwise the figures are ordinary: Samuel Lincoln (1622) and Adam Hawkes (1605) were born here before 1900; and 21% of its homes were built before 1919, close to the 15% in the typical UK town.