Mary Davies, The Historic Building Investigator, in 1972

Mary Davies was an 'Investigator of Historic Buildings'. She travelled around the North of England, visiting various old buildings and evaluating them based on their historic and architectural importance.

The clip is taken from a programme originally broadcast on 23rd February in 1972.  Whilst the video features Mary working in The Lake District, she covered the whole of the north of  England in her work, so would have spent a lot of time assessing buildings in Lancashire.

Watch on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI3e3WS8mFM

Journey back to 1972 with a historic building investigator traversing Northern England. They meticulously assess structures, grading them based on architectural and historical significance. Witness the process of evaluating and cataloguing these buildings for preservation.

Mary Davies has spent fifteen years working as an Investigator of Historic Buildings for the Department of the Environment. She explains that she is not a detective in the usual sense, but someone trained to recognise historic architecture — “a trained eye,” as she puts it — whose job is to identify, record, and grade important buildings across the North of England.

Her work in the Lake District involves listing buildings of architectural and historic interest, and grading them as Grade I or Grade II. She shows an example of a traditional Lakeland farmhouse: a long rectangular range combining house and farm buildings under one roof. These structures, she notes, were designed entirely for practical purposes, not for the views.

She points out a typical 17th-century building, highlighting distinctive Lake District features such as the external stone staircase and the spinning gallery — a feature not found elsewhere in the country. She also demonstrates a corn-drying kiln built into a hillside, where fuel such as peat would be burned below while oats were laid out above to dry.

Another building she examines retains its medieval character with a circular chimney and enclosed circular stair. It is listed Grade II for being a relatively unaltered example of the region’s late-medieval architecture — while not rare locally, it is still important enough to protect.

At Hartsop Hall, the largest house in its hamlet, she shows the massive 16th-century walls, four feet thick and resting on boulders. The front retains its early windows, including a charming round-headed mullioned example, often whitewashed against the weather. Because of its completeness, she considers it deserving of Grade I status. She then shows how later additions — a 17th-century barn and an 18th-century wing — illustrate the evolution of a working farm. Although it is now National Trust property, Mary stresses that this makes no difference to her: in listing terms, the Trust is simply another owner.

Back in her office, Mary explains how she types her official lists from notes that help her re-visualise each building. She uses detailed 25-inch maps to mark every structure, and owners are informed that they must not demolish or alter listed buildings without permission from planning authorities and, in more significant cases, from Whitehall.

Mary reflects on her background: both parents were practical people — her mother a dressmaker, her father an engineer. Growing up in the aftermath of the First World War, with her father often unemployed, she was taught to use tools from a young age and built models from Meccano. She longed to be an architect, making measured drawings and cardboard models of her local parish church. But in that era, she was dismissed with: “Girls aren’t architects.” Instead, she went to art school, obtained a teaching diploma, and worked as a teacher during and after the Second World War. By her thirties, she realised teaching would not fulfil her creative ambitions.

She saved what she could, took a bedsit in London, and studied at the Central School of Art and Design. It was a difficult period — often going without meals — and she had no certainty of where it might lead. Then, unexpectedly, came an offer from Nikolaus Pevsner, asking her to assist with research for The Buildings of England series. She worked with him for four years. When her parents began failing in health, she returned north. Soon after, the Ministry of Housing advertised for an investigator to cover the entire area up to the Scottish border. She applied and was appointed.

Most buildings she encounters are Grade II, meaning they cannot be demolished or altered without approval. Around 5% are Grade I, reserved for the most outstanding examples — such as Levens Hall, with its medieval peel tower and famous topiary gardens.

She describes the landscapes of Northumberland — vast skies, large estates — and explains the region’s fortified towns, particularly Berwick-upon-Tweed. Its mid-16th-century bastioned walls, adapted for artillery, are unique in Northern Europe for their completeness. These ancient monuments are not within Mary’s remit, as she deals only with habitable buildings.

Visiting Berwick, she discusses the challenges of finding new uses for historic buildings. She examines an early 18th-century barracks — the earliest purpose-built barracks in England — now successfully repurposed as a regimental museum. Listing, she emphasises, does not freeze buildings as museum pieces; they are meant to serve modern needs while remaining available for future generations.

Inside the town hall, she demonstrates how flexible use can preserve a building: the old market hall now houses a café; certain arches have been enclosed for shops; the council chamber remains in use; and the former prison is now a museum.

Dating buildings often requires detective work, she says — analysing carvings, mouldings, and architectural details. She notes that Berwick parish church includes stone repurposed from the town’s demolished castle.

Once a year, Mary meets her superior, Mr Dale, the Chief Investigator, who visits her in the field. He describes the origins of building listing after wartime bomb damage, the 22-year effort to produce the first nationwide list, and the altered standards of the new survey. Previously, little attention was given to 19th-century architecture; the new survey corrects this, considering both individual significance and group value — how buildings contribute collectively to a streetscape.

The new list, he says, will include about 200,000 buildings. Condition at the time of listing is irrelevant — the point is to avoid making judgements based on temporary neglect. Owners wishing to alter or demolish must make their case to local authorities or, for the best examples, to the Secretary of State.

Compared with France, which gives generous state support to a smaller number of buildings, England protects far more with relatively minimal government intervention. Grants are limited and reserved for the most important cases.

Mary reflects on the physically demanding nature of the work — walking streets in all weathers, taking notes on the spot, typing in the evenings, collaborating with administrators in London. She finds deep satisfaction in completing each volume of the listing survey, even though her name appears nowhere in the published lists. The true reward is seeing neglected historic buildings revitalised, given new life by responsible owners, and preserved for future generations. She considers her role a small but meaningful contribution to that continuity.

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Historic England

Broadly speaking, Mary's work is now done by Historic England assessors.  The following is a brief history of how the listing and building protection system in England developed. It is possible to follow it through a handful of key acts, organisations and milestones.

Historic Building Protection Timeline

1882 – Ancient Monuments Protection Act. The first UK law to give the state any role in protecting antiquities; it introduced the idea of a “schedule” of monuments and a government inspector. 

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Early 20th century / 1913 – the scheduling system expands. Scheduling (the protection of monuments) developed from that 1882 groundwork and was formally extended in later legislation. 

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1944–1947 – wartime planning and the first statutory listing. Concerns about wartime damage and post-war reconstruction led to the Town and Country Planning Acts (including 1947) that established the modern listing system for buildings of architectural or historic interest. 

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1953 – Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments Act. Strengthened the protection regime, allowed the state to acquire and give grants for important buildings, and created the Historic Buildings Council(s). 

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1983/1984 – National Heritage Act and English Heritage. The National Heritage Act 1983 created the Historic Buildings & Monuments Commission for England (the working name became English Heritage), bringing several advisory/ad hoc bodies together under one umbrella. 

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2011 – National Heritage List for England (NHLE) put online. The statutory list entries (listed buildings, scheduled monuments, registered parks & gardens, battlefields etc.) were made publicly searchable as a single online resource. 

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2015 – split of English Heritage → Historic England + English Heritage Trust. The regulatory and advisory functions remained in the public body now called Historic England; the running of the National Heritage Collection of visitor sites moved to the new charitable English Heritage Trust.

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Grade III

In the video, Mary Davies makes reference to a Grade III (three) listing.  These are not in use anymore and the Grade II* (two star) was introduced around that time.

Summary

• Grade III existed until 1970 as a non-statutory “local importance” category.

• It was abolished because it caused confusion and had no legal protection.

• Local listing by councils eventually filled the space it vacated.

• Mentioning it in this 1972 video makes perfect sense — it was discussing surveys done under the older system.

What Grade III actually was

Grade III was part of the original post-war listing system (1947–1970).
It was intended for:

“Buildings of some merit which fall short of the criteria for national listing but are still of local or minor interest.”

In practice, Grade III functioned as:

• An official recognition of local significance

• Buildings worth keeping an eye on

• But not legally protected through the national listing regime

This is why it feels to you like “local listing” — because that’s exactly the conceptual territory Grade III occupied.

Why Grade III disappeared (1970)

Grade III was formally abolished in January 1970 when the Department of the Environment overhauled the listing categories.

The reasons:

a) Grade III had no legal force

Only Grades I and II had statutory protection.
Grade III was effectively “a nice idea but not enforceable.”

b) It created confusion

Local authorities, architects, and owners often assumed Grade III meant their building was protected — but it wasn’t.

c) Many Grade III buildings should have been either:

• Properly listed (II or II*)

• Or not listed at all

It blurred the threshold.

d) The solution

To solve this:

• Grade III was abolished

• A new subset, Grade II*, was created for clearly nationally important buildings

• “Local interest” buildings were dropped from national lists

What happened next — the shift into local listing

Once Grade III disappeared, there was a vacuum.

Between 1970 and the 1990s, local authorities gradually developed their own:

• Local lists

• “Buildings of Townscape Merit”

• “Locally Important Heritage Assets”

These were not part of the national system, but they filled the role that Grade III once occupied:

Buildings valued locally, but not nationally rare or significant enough for statutory listing.

This is why you correctly associate Mary Davies’s reference with the modern “local listing” idea — that category effectively replaced Grade III, though the replacement was decentralised and created by councils, not the national system.

Why you never hear about Grade III today

Because:

• It has been gone for 55 years

• It had no statutory protection

• All Grade III buildings either disappeared, were demolished, or were reconsidered for higher grades during later reviews

• Modern listing guidance only refers to I, II*, II, and locally listed buildings

Most people under 60 in the heritage sector have never worked in a system that included Grade III.

Why it was mentioned in the documentary

Mary Davies’s training and early fieldwork pre-dated the 1970 abolition.

She was intimately familiar with:

• Grade I

• Grade II

• Grade III

Her Lake District surveys would have been carried out largely in the 1960s, under the older system.

So in the 1972 programme:

• She is speaking from the model she used at the time of the surveys

• She may not have adapted her public explanation to the new (and still bedding-in) II/II* terminology

• Grade III would still have been within her living working memory

This is why her description doesn’t match modern listing language.

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