ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1645424
This article is part of the Research TopicUrban Nature and its Benefits for Human HealthView all 5 articles
The scenicness of historic buildings rivals that of natural features: evidence from crowdsourced photographs of English urban areas
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
- 2University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
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Spending time in more scenic areas is associated with better health and well-being, making it important to understand how scenicness is influenced by environmental features. Urban areas, where natural features have often been replaced by buildings, are generally perceived as less scenic than rural ones. However, historic architecture may enhance urban scenicness. Using data from Historic England and Scenic-or-Not, a crowdsourced platform rating the scenicness of UK photographs, we analyse the association between 'listed' buildings and scenicness. We find that the presence of a listed building in a photograph of an urban scene is associated with a 0.61-point increase in scenicness on a 10-point scale (equivalent to 0.53 sd). This effect is comparable to that of forests and lakes and is greater for buildings designated as more significant, listed earlier, and dating from earlier periods. These findings highlight the positive contribution of historic buildings to urban visual appeal and provide empirical support for their continued preservation.
Keywords: scenicness, Historic buildings, Urban areas, Natural beauty, listed buildings
Received: 11 Jun 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sherborne and Malthouse. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Eugene Malthouse, eugene.malthouse1@nottingham.ac.uk
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