Site appraisal
What's protected on and around this site?
Send the red line and get every designation that touches it, each with its grade, geometry and custodian record. A constraint layer without a GIS team.
GET /v1/heritage?polygon=...
Heritage & Designations API
The UK's protected places, reconciled.
Listed buildings, scheduled monuments, parks and gardens, battlefields, wrecks and World Heritage Sites, from all four national registers, served as map-ready geometry with each custodian's licence and attribution on every record. We keep it current with the registers; you just call it.
Whitby AbbeyScheduled Monument
GET /v1/heritage?point=54.4886,-0.6075&radius=250 → 4 designations
4
National custodians
7
Designation registers
1
Schema, stable ids
OGL
Open Government Licence
The reconciliation
Four registers. One record shape.
Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland, Cadw and the Department for Communities each publish their own register, in their own format, with their own grading system, coordinate reference and update cycle. We reconcile all four into one schema, give every designation a stable identifier, and track changes as the custodians revise their registers.
Historic England
England · EPSG:27700
Grade III*II
Historic Environment Scotland
Scotland · EPSG:27700
Category ABC
Cadw
Wales · EPSG:27700
Grade III*II
Department for Communities
Northern Ireland · EPSG:29903
Grade AB+B1B2
One schemaAll four nations
id stable across register revisions
grade the nation's own, never translated
geometry EPSG:4326, reprojected from the grids
attribution the custodian, on every recordGrades are never translated. A Scottish Category B stays a Category B, because presenting it as an English Grade II would misstate the law that applies to the building.
The alternative
The pipeline you don't have to build.
Without the API, heritage data is a project. Four registers on four portals, in four formats. Downloads that start going stale the day you fetch them. Reprojection from two national grids. Polygons that arrive broken and need repair. Then Historic England amends the register on a Thursday, and your copy is quietly wrong.
What you'd build
HE · EnglandHES · ScotlandCadw · WalesDfC · N. Ireland
fetch
Four registers from four custodians, each on its own portal, in its own format.
reproject
British National Grid and Irish Grid into WGS84, without moving a wall.
repair
Polygons that arrive self-intersecting and break spatial queries.
reconcile
Four grading systems kept distinct, duplicate entries resolved.
watch
Listings, delistings and amendments, every cycle, forever.
host
The database, the spatial index and the uptime.
…every cycle, forever. Or:
What you call
We run that pipeline so you don't have to. Ingest, reconciliation, geometry repair and serving all happen on our infrastructure. You call one endpoint, and the stale-copy problem is ours.
One request
GET /v1/heritage?point=55.8562,-4.2467&radius=250
→ 200 OK · 14 designations
geometry EPSG:4326, repaired, valid
grades each nation's own
attribution inline, the custodian named
provenance snapshot and source dates, on every responseEverything on the left, already done.
This is infrastructure, not a download. We run the pipeline; you build the product.
The record
The record says what it knows.
Every designation carries the same fields: a stable identifier, its nation's own grade, geometry served as EPSG:4326 and reprojected from the national grids, and the custodian's attribution. Where a recorded date is only precise to the year, the record says so rather than inventing a day.
The Circus, Bath Grade I Listed
GET /v1/heritage/vhe_des_01J8QNXK
{
"id": "vhe_des_01J8QNXK",
"type": "listed_building",
"name": "The Circus",
"jurisdiction": "england",
"grade": "Grade I",
"custodian": "Historic England",
"designated": "1950",
"date_precision": "year",
"statutory": true,
"geometry": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [-2.3629, 51.3868]
},
"attribution": "Contains Historic England data. OGL v3.0.",
"provenance": {
"snapshotId": "heritage-20260618-01",
"sources": [{
"custodian": "Historic England",
"releaseDate": "2026-06-11",
"fetchedAt": "2026-06-13T03:11:08Z"
}]
}
}
The cycle
When the register moves, the API moves.
Registers are living documents. Buildings are listed and delisted every week, boundaries are redrawn, at-risk entries come and go. A file you downloaded in the spring knows none of this.
The register wireJun 2026
Thu11
Fri12
Sat13
Sun14
Mon15
Tue16
Wed17
Thu18
2026-06-11 · register release
Historic England amends a list entry
vhe_des_01J8QNXK · boundary redrawn
2026-06-13 · ingested
fetched 03:11:08Z · reconciled · geometry repaired
re-served under the same id vhe_des_01J8QNXK
2026-06-18 · your next call
"id": "vhe_des_01J8QNXK"
"snapshotId": "heritage-20260618-01"
"releaseDate": "2026-06-11"
"fetchedAt": "2026-06-13T03:11:08Z"
You never host a copy, so you never host a stale one.
The datasets
Every designation, on its own page.
Coverage follows what the custodians publish, so the data is as current as the registers themselves. Each designation type has its own page with coverage, sources and schema.
01
Listed Buildings
Listed buildings from all four nations, with each nation's grades kept true.
View dataset → 02Scheduled Monuments
Nationally important archaeological sites, served as polygons.
View dataset → 03Registered Parks and Gardens
Designed landscapes of special historic interest, all four nations.
View dataset → 04World Heritage Sites
UNESCO sites and their buffer zones, from the national custodians.
View dataset → 05Registered Battlefields
Battlefields on the national registers, statutory status flagged.
View dataset → 06Protected Wreck Sites
Designated historic wrecks and protected marine sites.
View dataset → 07Heritage at Risk
Historic England's at-risk register for condition due diligence.
View dataset →The API
You already know how to query it.
Heritage answers the same location queries that already return planning, environmental and title data. Point, radius, bounding box or polygon, or a single designation by its identifier. One key, one schema, national scale.
One call returns every designation that touches a point, with the custodian's attribution inline.
Query by point
GET /v1/heritage?point=55.8562,-4.2467
{
"count": 2,
"results": [
{
"id": "vhe_des_01J8QNXK",
"type": "listed_building",
"grade": "Category B",
"custodian": "Historic Environment Scotland"
},
{
"id": "vhe_des_01J2M4TP",
"type": "conservation_area",
"statutory": true,
"custodian": "Glasgow City Council"
}
]
}The use cases
Built for what you're building.
One API, four jobs. Each of these is a question the API answers in one request.
Property reports
Is this building listed, and at what grade?
A point query returns the listing, the nation's own grade and attribution ready to print. It drops straight into a report or a conveyancing pack.
GET /v1/heritage?point=51.5074,-0.1278
Maps in products
Show every designation in the viewport.
Bounding-box queries return map-ready geometry with the custodian's licence and attribution served on every record.
GET /v1/heritage?bbox=-0.16,51.49,-0.10,51.52
Councils and custodians
We already publish this. Why run a server too?
Publishing through the standard routes is the whole job. The register arrives here hosted, versioned and queryable, by the teams that published it too. No GIS server to procure, no API to run.
One register, served at /v1/heritage
Every week an engineer spends nursing a shapefile pipeline is a week they are not building your product.
The guarantees
Answers you can defend.
Licence
Open Government Licence sources, with each record carrying its register's licence terms inline.
Attribution
The custodian is named on every record, so attribution is never guesswork.
Provenance
Every response names its snapshot, the custodian's release date and the moment we ingested it.
Stable identifiers
Ids survive register revisions, so the references you store keep working.
