Health and Welfare Buildings

A guide to outline the selection criteria used when listing health and welfare buildings.

This selection guide looks at hospitals, asylums, workhouses, almshouses and health centres. They provide strong architectural evidence of changing attitudes to the sick and destitute, and have long been some of our most functional buildings, as well as among our largest. Their design can say much about changing social attitudes and about science’s impact on architecture too.

This is one of a series of guides which set out some of our approaches to listing buildings. Covering twenty broad categories of building types, they including historical overviews and special considerations for listing, plus select bibliographies. They are primarily intended to develop understanding of listed buildings and structures, and to offer insight into listing decision making.