# Conservation areas

Areas of special architectural or historic interest in England, as councils and Historic England have supplied them.

## Facts

- Published by: Councils, Historic England and MHCLG
- Level of detail: Outline
- Updates: Daily
- Licence: Open Government Licence 3.0
- Levels: Map point

## Caveats

- This is the national dataset on planning.data.gov.uk, which its publishers call a work in progress and incomplete. Some councils have not supplied their conservation areas, and those councils are hatched on the map.
- Where a council has no data of its own, Historic England's records are used if they exist. They may be older or less exact than the council's.
- The dataset holds some duplicate areas. Where two outlines are at least 80% the same shape, Open Index draws the better one.
- About 950 conservation areas have a name but no outline in the national dataset. They are not drawn.
- A hatched council may still have conservation areas. It means the outlines are missing here, not that none exist.
- England only.

## Sources

### Conservation areas (planning.data.gov.uk)

- Publisher: Local planning authorities in England and Historic England, collected by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
- Licence: [Open Government Licence 3.0](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)
- Edition: conservation-area 2026-10-15
- Published: 15 October 2026
- Fetched: 15 October 2026
- Updates: daily
- Credit: © Historic England 2026. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
- Publisher's page: https://www.planning.data.gov.uk/dataset/conservation-area

## Use it

- [The map](https://openindex.co.uk/map/conservation-areas)
- API: https://openindex.co.uk/v1/layers/conservation-areas

## How to cite

Source: Open Index, openindex.co.uk. Link to this page, https://openindex.co.uk/sources/conservation-areas.

Open Index's own text and the figures it works out are licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Source data keeps its publishers' licences, named with each figure. Give each figure's period and source with it.

- © Historic England 2026. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.

Snapshot 2026.10.8, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23508850. The HTML page: https://openindex.co.uk/sources/conservation-areas