CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 25 INFRASTRUCTURE NIGEL CROWE Piloting a national listed building consent order The pilot Canal & River Trust draft national listed building consent order, covering a range of listed structures in single ownership, will test the methodology in England. The Canal & River Trust is the charity that cares for, protects and brings to life 2,000 miles of historic canals and river navigations in England and Wales. This network of man-made transport waterways, mainly constructed between around 1760–1830, is valued as world-class industrial heritage. It is the third-largest estate of designated heritage assets in the UK, with four Unesco world heritage sites, 46 scheduled monuments, 2,692 listed buildings and 304 conservation areas. In England the trust has some 2,474 listed buildings, of which 12 are Grade I, 53 Grade II* and 2,409 Grade II. Most of these designated assets are engineering structures, and range from iconic aqueducts and tunnels to workaday weirs, sluices, locks and bridges of all types. The trust has considerable experience and expertise in dealing with historic waterways. It employs professionally qualified heritage advisers who work with specialist teams of engineers, and its track record for works to heritage assets is generally excellent. But the work of managing the waterways heritage in an affordable, achievable and sustainable way is never-ending. The trust faces challenging times in securing funding, planning for climate change and dealing with unforeseen events that affect its centuries-old estate. From the early 2000s British Waterways and its successor body the trust sought heritagemanagement tools that could improve efficiency and reduce bureaucracy. Heritage partnership agreements were developed for a number of multi-designated sites, and in 2011 British Waterways was working with English Heritage on a national heritage partnership agreement covering listed locks and bridges, the two most common heritage assets found on the waterways. The passing of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 paved the way for listed building consent orders to be granted in England. It soon became clear that the trust, with its substantial estate of nationally distributed structures of similar or standardised type, was a perfect candidate for the development of a pilot national listed building consent order (NLBCO). The NLBCO pilot was established as a collaboration between the trust, English Heritage (Historic England after 2015) and the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). From the outset there was considerable discussion around the extent of the draft order; what should be included and what left out.The initial idea was to include only locks and bridges; structures with oft-repeated forms, and subject to predictably routine and repetitive works. But it soon became apparent that the NLBCO could work for other types of functional waterway infrastructure. It was finally agreed to include aqueducts, bridges, cranes, locks, boundary or distance markers, mileposts, tunnels, waterway walls, weirs and sluices. The NLBCO does not include more complex buildings (warehouses, cottages, offices and yards), as these rarely conform to any standardised design, and they may be affected by long Braunston Lock 1 on the Grand Union Canal Bridge 4 on the Grand Union Canal THE LISTING PROCESS IN ENGLAND
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