Dragon’s teeth and elf garden among 2025 additions to English heritage list | Heritage

If Nazi tanks had ever attempted to invade Guildford, they surely would have been thwarted by concrete pyramid-shaped obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth”.

Eight decades after the defences were installed in Surrey woodland, their history is being remembered by Historic England (HE), which has included them on its list of remarkable historic places granted protection in 2025.

The heritage body publishes a roundup of unusual listings to draw attention to the diversity of places that join the national heritage list for England each year.

As well as the anti-tank defences, this year’s list of 19 places includes a revolutionary 1960s concrete university block, a model boat club boathouse built in 1933 by men who were long-term unemployed, and a magical suburban “elf garden”.

Claudia Kenyatta and Emma Squire, the co-CEOs of HE, said the listings provided a connection to the people and events that shaped communities.

“From ancient burial sites to shipwrecks and wartime defences to postmodernist buildings, street furniture and arts and craft gardens, these sites reveal the fascinating history that surrounds us all,” they said.

The “dragon’s teeth” in Thorneycroft Wood, Surrey, were built in 1941-42 by the Royal Engineers and were manned by the Home Guard. They have been categorised as a scheduled monument.

HE said they were “among the best-preserved examples of the measures taken to defend Britain against invasion during the second world war”. The defences are important because they survive but also because of the story they tell – of a time when Britain was braced for what in the eyes of many was certain German invasion after the fall of France in 1940.

They were part of a strategy that included a network of coastal defences and inland strongholds called “nodal points”, essentially creating a fortress town or “anti-tank island” that could resist attack for seven days. Guildford, with its important road and rail links, was designated as a category A nodal point.

The 1960s concrete building on the list is the Renold building on the Umist campus in Manchester. Designed by WA Gibbon, it was the first purpose-built lecture theatre block in an English higher education institution, and for that reason is regarded as a gamechanger.

It also, for many, looks incredible. Unless you hate it. Gibbon was influenced by modernists such as Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer and the block, with its zigzag east wall and transparent stair tower, is seen as an exciting “taste of Brasília” in Manchester.

After being turned down for listing in 2005, this year the building has been listed at Grade II.

In total, 199 historic buildings and sites in England were added to the national list in 2025. Other unusual listings include:

• Bournville radio sailing and model boat club boathouse and concrete boating pond in Birmingham. It was built in 1933 after the Cadbury chocolate family hired 64 men who were long-term unemployed and not eligible for state benefit. The Grade II listing recognises its rarity, the craftsmanship and the story of philanthropy.

• Tudor Croft garden in Guisborough, Teesside. It was created from 1934 for the brick industrialist Ronald Crossley and one of its highlights is a section filled with terracotta gnomes, pixies and elves.

• A submarine telephone cable hauler and gantry at Enderby’s wharf in Greenwich, now listed as a scheduled monument. The dockside equipment is linked to the first successful transatlantic telephone cable and can be seen as “a birthplace of global communications”.

• A shipwreck off the Dorset coast described as exceptionally rare and known as the Pin Wreck because of the hundreds of copper bolts visible on the seabed. The bolts once held together the hull of the vessel, a 19th-century steam mooring lighter. It was recommended for protection after archaeological surveys by Bournemouth University.

• St Peter’s church in Littlebury Green, Essex, which is a once common but now increasingly rare type of prefabricated church. Known as a tin tabernacle, it was cheaply built in 1885 using wood, corrugated iron “and faith” as a place of worship for people who lived a long way from the main parish church.