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What you may not do to a property
Every statutory protection on record in England and Wales, placed against the postcode district it falls in. These are legal constraints on what an owner may do — and they are not on any property listing.
| Designation | On record | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Listed buildings | 379,097 | Consent is needed to alter or extend one, inside as well as out. |
| Conservation areas | 10,662 | Extra control over demolition, extensions and trees. |
| Article 4 directions | 8,005 | Permitted development rights are REMOVED — work that would normally need no application does need one here. |
| Tree preservation zones | 101,726 | The trees are protected; cutting or lopping without consent is an offence. |
| Scheduled monuments | 19,652 | The strictest designation there is. |
| Registered parks and gardens | 1,823 | |
| World heritage sites | 69 |
How these are placed, and where that is approximate
None of these datasets carries a postcode, so each has to be placed geographically, and points and areas are handled differently on purpose. A listed building is at a location, so it is assigned to the nearest postcode. A conservation area or Article 4 direction covers ground, so the useful question is whether your postcode is inside it — every such polygon is tested against all 1,573,900 live postcode centroids in England and Wales by ray casting, not matched to its centre.
Where a polygon is smaller than the gap between postcode centroids — most Article 4 directions are a single terrace — containment finds nothing at all, and the designation is placed against the nearest postcode to its own published centre instead. Those are marked nearby rather than shown as containing your postcode. Treating the two the same would have been the difference between 41% and 99.8% of Article 4 directions appearing at all, which is exactly why the distinction is kept visible rather than smoothed over.
Source: planning.data.gov.uk, Open Government Licence v3.0. Always confirm against the authority before relying on it — this is a signpost, not a legal search.