Welcome to the National Trust Historic Buildings, Sites & Monuments Record (NT HBSMR). The National Trust estate is vast. We own more than 250,000 ha of land and over 1,100 km of coastline across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This makes us the largest private owner of archaeological sites, structures and landscapes in Britain. Many of these are of national or international importance including over 1,100 scheduled monuments (in England alone) and 6 World Heritage Sites. The built environment includes over 29,000 buildings of which over 3,500 are listed in England.
Our prime aim is to reveal and share the significance of our places and ensure that their special qualities are understood, protected, enhanced and enjoyed, for the benefit of the nation, by present and future generations. Understanding the significance of this enormous estate is the key to managing it and we achieve this through survey and analysis. Our landscape and buildings surveys are very detailed and the HBSMR is indispensable in storing, sharing and exploiting the information they provide.
The full database includes over 80,000 sites and includes all periods from the earliest traces of human activity to the present day. There are over 68,000 monuments in England and these are available via the Heritage Gateway. The HBSMR has come a long way since the earliest card-file system was introduced in 1964 by a volunteer using Ordnance Survey records. It will always be a work in progress as we continually add to our knowledge through ongoing survey and advances in archaeological techniques and thinking. We still have a great deal to do to make the HBSMR fully comprehensive and some parts of it may be brief or incomplete. We have endeavoured to reference all source material in the record but there may be instances where local, regional or national datasets have not been acknowledged - please do contact us if you notice an omission.
For further information on the NT HBSMR or to request a search on the resource, please feel free to contact us via hbsmr@nationaltrust.org.uk