47 listed buildings, 2 of them Grade II*

The Beeches Including Stable BlockGrade II* listedWhite Hart HotelGrade II listedChurch HouseGrade II listedFairfield Preparatory SchoolGrade II listedBeech Lawn House Including Orangery to RearGrade II listed+1See 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.

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 6 entries were listed in 1949. 33 came in 1974, 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.

Henry Bright

Harry Southwell

Bernard Collins

Buck Read

1800182518501875190019251950

Henry Bright1810–1873 · British artist (1810–1873)

BC

Bernard Collins1880–1951 · English first-class cricketer (1880-1951)

BR

Buck Read1880–1970 · American basketball player-coach

HS

Harry Southwell1830–1890 · English cricketer and pastoralist

Everyone born in Saxmundham → Birthplaces from Wikidata; portraits from Wikimedia Commons.

The official list counts 47 listed buildings in Saxmundham, including Church of St John Baptist. High Street alone has 11 listed buildings. A conservation area has protected part of it since 1970. Most entries on the list, 79%, are houses, terraces and villas.

Henry Bright (1810), Bernard Collins (1880) and Buck Read (1880) are among the 4 people born here before 1900. The big year was 1974, when 33 of the 47 went on the list. Beyond that, like most towns its size, it has no Grade I building; per resident it sits near the middle of UK towns; and 14% of its homes were built before 1919, close to the 15% in the typical UK town.