Can a lead urn be a “building”? And if so, can it be listed? Which sound like fairly daft questions but, strange though it may seem, they were the nub of the issue in Dill v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government & Anor [2020] UKSC 20.

The historic garden at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire had contained a pair of early 18th-century lead urns on limestone pedestals which had been moved several times since 1939. In 1973, Major Dill (the appellant’s father) moved them to the garden of Idlicote House and in 1986 they were added to the list of listed buildings under s.54 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1971. In 1993, Mr Dill acquired the house and the urns and, unaware of the urns’ presence on the list, sold them at auction in 2009.

In 2015, Stratford-on-Avon District Council discovered that the urns had been sold and told him that he should have sought listed building consent to remove them. When he applied for retrospective consent in February 2016 it was refused, and the Council issued a listed building enforcement notice requiring their reinstatement. Continue reading →