Imagine that you’re offered the choice of two hotel rooms for your upcoming holiday in England: one has a view of a lake, and the other overlooks the local town. Which would you choose?
Many of us would likely choose the lake view, perhaps without too much hesitation. But what if the town view featured a host of grade I listed buildings constructed in centuries gone by? Which room would you choose now?
Previous research has found that spending time in more scenic locations is associated with greater health and happiness. But the focus of this research has been upon natural features, such as mountains, lakes and trees.
This research raises the following questions: what makes urban areas more scenic when natural features are fewer and farther between? And could historic buildings play a role in enhancing local scenicness?
These are the exact same questions we asked in a study just published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology – and answered using two large datasets.
The first was from Historic England: a dataset that included almost 380,000 listed buildings, plus the grade (I, II* or II) and date of their listing, and the century in which the buildings were constructed.
The second dataset was Scenic-Or-Not, an online platform where users rate the scenicness of photographs taken across the UK on a scale from 1 (‘not scenic’) to 10 (‘very scenic’). This dataset contained over 1.5 million ratings for more than 200,000 photographs.
Our first step was to apply some data science methodologies (see details in the paper) to identify photographs taken in English urban areas within 100m of a listed building. This enabled us to compare the scenicness ratings of photographs with and without listed buildings, to see what impact the presence of a listed building might have.
What we found was that the average scenicness of photographs with listed buildings was, on average, 0.61 points higher on our ten point scale than photographs without. This may not sound like much, but the average scenicness of English urban areas was 2.43, so this represents a 25% increase.
This scenicness-enhancing effect was similar to that of certain natural features, such as forests and lakes (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. The change in scenicness associated with the presence of a listed building: similar in magnitude to a forest or lake, but not quite as good as a mountain.
Not only that, photographs in which the most prominent listed building was Grade I or Grade II* were rated as more scenic than those featuring less architecturally significant (Grade II) buildings (see Figure 2a). Furthermore, photographs featuring buildings constructed in earlier centuries were also judged as more scenic (see Figure 2b).
Figures 2a and 2b. Scenicness changes according to building listing grade (a) and century of construction (b)
Together, these findings highlight the positive contribution of historic buildings to the scenicness of English urban areas, and suggest they have a comparable effect to natural features such as forests and lakes.
So next time you see an old building, take it in!
You can find the full, published academic study, at the Frontiers in Psychology site
