On 24th September 2025, a diverse group of heritage-focused built environment professionals gathered at One Great George Street, London, for a dynamic and insightful roundtable event hosted by AECOM, Bowman Riley, the London Historic Buildings Trust and Smith Jenkins Planning & Heritage.
Chaired by Mark Hosea, CEO of London Historic Buildings Trust, the discussion tackled one of the most pressing questions in the built environment sector today: At what cost do we preserve our heritage?
A Provocative Conversation
The debate brought together professionals from across the sector, architects, local authority officers, developers, heritage consultants, and policymakers, each bringing their own perspective on how we define value, make trade-offs, and take action in the face of finite resources and growing development pressures.
The conversation centred on four key questions:
1. What value do we place on our heritage assets?
The room quickly reached consensus on heritage buildings’ emotional, cultural, and historical value. However, when it came to quantifying their economic and social value, views diverged. Some argued that heritage assets offer long-term returns through tourism, place identity, and sustainability. Others cautioned that these returns are often intangible and difficult to justify compared to modern housing and infrastructure needs.
Tom Billington, Oculus Management, posed the question about how we actually define value.
“Value engineering makes me shiver because that’s really just about cost-cutting. Value really needs to be defined differently, looking at the value a repurposed asset can bring for the community, social value and heritage skills. We need to contextualise it as something wider”.
Tom Foxall, Regional Director for London and the South East at Historic England, said that the use of “we” is the biggest shift in how we think about heritage assets.
“Buildings are listed based on expert views, but local people often place different values on a building – whether because of a personal connection, a sense of pride or local identity”.
Tom Nancollas, Assistant Director (Design) at the City of London Corporation, advised, “We have one of the world’s most advanced heritage protection frameworks enshrined in our planning system. As a result, there is no debate about preserving heritage assets themselves – but our system arguably places too much value on the more quixotic ‘settings’ of those assets. We need to be better at recognising that heritage assets are, in the main, highly resilient presences that have the potential to play a role in growth, not be sidelined by it.”
Quinn London Ltd Heritage Director Matthew Sellars said, “We would love to refurbish all these buildings and give them a new life. A former church makes a great restaurant or venue.”
Helen Walker, Conservation Architect at Bowman Riley, added,
“It’s the human connection and history that have the most value.”
Lydia Morrow, Project Director at Lipton Rogers Developments, provided a developer perspective: “It’s about the story. It’s not a black-and-white conversation; it’s nuanced. What are we preserving and why?”
Tom Nancollas responded,
“The art of understanding a heritage asset is storytelling. Buildings must be capable of change because the story isn’t over.”
Paul Crisp, Director of Heritage and Townscape at Smith Jenkins, said, “Sometimes the human stories are hard to find. As planners, we need to speak to harder-to-reach community groups and persuade them of the value of engagement.”
2. Can we afford to save all our assets?
The short answer? No.
While there was a deep appreciation for the UK’s vast and varied built heritage, many accepted that tough decisions must be made. Funding constraints, coupled with a backlog of deteriorating buildings, mean that we cannot preserve everything. Instead, the emphasis must be on making strategic choices, with clarity and transparency about why certain assets are prioritised over others.
Laura Jevons, Director and Culture Sector Lead at AECOM commented, “It’s often more cost-effective to demolish and rebuild than refurbish a historic building. Our arts and culture clients struggle to get their buildings to work commercially, and there is an underlying lack of funding available”.
Clarissa Levi, Art & Heritage Counsel at Wedlake Bell, responded, “I work with many clients who own country houses. It’s impossible to keep these historic buildings running, preserve their art collections, and maintain their land without financial support. Even when generations of a family have lived in the property, they can’t afford to live there anymore. So many open them to the public, which benefits the community as more people get to appreciate these properties that are in private ownership.”
Paul Crisp said,
“There is a need for pragmatism. Retrofitting a listed house can bring significant economic and carbon reduction benefits.”
Helen Walker commented, “It’s a balance between retaining use and causing some harm. It’s about the optimum viable use.”
Tom Billington noted, “There’s always the problem of who will pay for any refurbishment works. We should be pulling people together from different organisations to collaborate and raise some capital”
Laura Jevons said,
“There is a distinction between value and cost. We can’t talk about cost in terms of historic buildings; we need to talk about value – the value of what it brings to the economy and community.”
Tom Foxall commented, “We need to think about the contribution to tourism and the environment too – in terms of embodied carbon, can we afford not to keep existing buildings?”
Tom Billington said, “People need to know how to retrofit older buildings. There is a huge opportunity to bring buildings of character back into viable use”.
Laura Jevons replied: “The net zero agenda has helped.”
Tom Billington said:
“If you can put solar panels on King’s College and York Minster, you can do anything. I’ve put a lift in a Norman church”.
Tom Nancollas advised that the City of London has a retrofit toolkit to encourage an appetite for retrofitting.
Laura Jevons noted, “It’s also about the condition of the building. Planning and costing the redevelopment of a building is difficult when its fabric and structural integrity continue to decline through water ingress”.
Daniel Wallington, CARE-accredited Structural Engineer at AECOM, said, “We are working on a factory in the Midlands that has been disused for over twenty years. Water ingress and vandalism have seriously affected its significance; it’s no longer worth saving.”
Daniel Wallington also gave an example of a Tudor castle on the south coast of England, which is hanging off the edge of a Jurassic cliff. The prohibitive cost of stabilising the cliff will help to save the castle, but the castle would need to be stabilised before the cliff. Therefore, one can’t commence without the other – a modern-day Catch-22.
Lydia Morrow said, “Buildings need to be more than nice to look at. Lots of heritage assets need to earn their keep. I think inconsistency between different planning authorities can be good, as without it, it’s just a rule book and you don’t get people buying into new ideas to breathe life into an older building”.
Tom Nancollas advised, “Our post-war planning system encourages a mindset that change is bad unless it’s been tried and tested.
“We need to train planning officers to be bolder.”
3. How do we prioritise which buildings we repair, refurbish, and potentially repurpose?
This sparked perhaps the most animated debate of the day. Some advocated for a data-driven approach, focusing on buildings with the greatest historical significance or those in areas where regeneration is already taking place. Others emphasised community value and social impact, arguing that local voices must be central in shaping priorities.
A common theme was the need to move away from a binary “preserve or demolish” mindset and instead embrace adaptive reuse to keep heritage alive in ways that serve modern needs.
Tom Nancollas put a strong case forward for focusing on the buildings people are willing to fight for.
Tom Billington highlighted some great examples of repurposing, including a church in the centre of Hartlepool, which is now an art gallery. “It was a light-touch project, but it was basically just a fit-out project. We need great architects and developers to see the art of the possible”.
Matt Sellars said,
“It’s also about local authorities stepping away from seeing historic buildings as liabilities but as opportunities for their communities.”
Helen Walker said, “It comes back to matching the right building with the right building owner. Viability may vary depending on use.
Tom Foxall told the group that Historic England had launched a Heritage Investment Prospectus at UKReiiF this May, which is all about matching buildings with new potential owners. He said, “The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s about seeing heritage as an opportunity. The next edition will have a housing focus and will include projects that will be easier to implement”.
Sam Dove, Senior Facilities Manager at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, highlighted that the cathedral launched the Wren Centre of Excellence for Heritage Crafts in June 2025 to support the craft skills shortage and find new uses for historic buildings that may not be apparent.
Laura Jevons summarised by saying that: “Maintaining heritage buildings is a labour of love”.
4. If you could repurpose any listed building in London, which one would it be and what for?
To wrap things up on a more imaginative note, but one that revealed much about the passion and creativity in the room, attendees were asked to dream up new uses for some of London’s most iconic listed buildings. The ideas were as creative as they were entertaining.
Suggestions included turning the BT Tower into a jaw-dropping 360-degree cinema, launching a design competition to give red phone boxes a stylish second life, and opening the doors of the Houses of Parliament to the public, because who wouldn’t want a behind-the-scenes tour with their morning coffee?
There were also calls to transform the private, gated gardens of Kensington and Chelsea into green spaces everyone could enjoy, re-purpose Greenwich power station into a business hub and re-using the abandoned coal jetty next to the power station as a restaurant in a glass box, reimagine the ground floor of the Bank of England as a welcoming café hub, and convert the London Trocadero into a buzzing open-plan dining destination. Oh, and let’s not forget the most eyebrow-raising proposal: turning Buckingham Palace into luxury apartments or Big Ben as a helter-skelter!
All in all, a fun and thoughtful way to end, with ideas that showed just how much creativity and care people have for London’s built heritage—and its future.
Looking Ahead
What emerged from the roundtable was not a single solution but renewed energy around the need for collaboration, creativity, and realism in heritage conversations. We need to be honest about our limitations and bold in reimagining how our historic buildings can serve communities in the future.
This roundtable marked just the beginning of a wider dialogue that will continue to shape how we value, fund, and futureproof our built heritage in the years to come.