Better to have loved and listed

It seems odd to pay an insurance premium for listed buildings. 

- Eleanor Doughty

THERE are few to-dos on the annual schedule of household jobs less appealing, yet more important than the renewal of household insurance. For contents insurance, the price comparison websites, brokers and forms to fill in ask for a rough value of all of the worldly goods in your home. How to calculate the value of your prized dresser, handed down from granny? And then there’s buildings insurance and calculating the rebuild cost of your home. Few of us, relatively speaking, are surveyors: must we become proficient in measuring the cost of bricks and (lime) mortar in a few minutes to get the right insurance deal? No—but it surely feels that way.

For owners of listed buildings, the task of securing home insurance is not necessarily harder or more important—we all love our homes, whatever level of national importance they possess—but it can be fraught with more hazards. This much was hammered home to COUNTRY LIFE when, last month, a reader got in touch asking us to investigate why insurance on his two properties—one in London in a protected garden square, the other a Grade II-listed house in Gloucestershire— might have increased by 19% in the past year, with, most gallingly, a specific increase of 7.5% ‘for listed buildings’.