English Heritage has announced that around £65m is needed to secure the future of the nation’s most costly and problematic buildings at risk.

Launching the 2007 Buildings at Risk Register, chief executive Simon Thurley said: “What makes these buildings expensive and difficult to revive is a combination of factors such as their vast scale, the fact that part of the site is often a structure which can only be preserved but will never have a beneficial use and, in some cases, their inaccessibility.”

The organisation is now calling on government to encourage public funding bodies to help invest in saving these buildings to secure our future heritage.

The 2007 Register lists 1,235 buildings, including the world’s first iron-framed building in Shrewsbury and Soho Foundry in the Midlands, where James Watt’s steam engine was constructed.

In 2006, the organisation offered £4.4m to buildings at risk, but this covered only 1.3 per cent of the estimated total conservation deficit of all the buildings on the Register, while building costs rose by around 4.4 per cent.