Gwennap pit in Cornwall, a Methodist open air meeting place. Photograph: Michael McCloy
Trawl through more than 300,000 images of mansions, tumbledown cottages, a 19th century laboratory built to look like a medieval chantry, the stump of a medieval church sticking out of the side of a terraced house, and an evil looking circular pond full of soupy green water, which was once the plunge pool of a Georgian spa, and eventually you will find the gracious home of Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage. (Hint: Grade II* listed, east London).
"Doesn't it look nice?" he said happily yesterday, as he pored over a laptop in a room three floors up within one of the legs of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner ("Triumphal arch, now containing police station. Erected 1846").
"Now, let's try yours - do you live in a listed house?"
Well, no, actually, though I did once try and fail to win listing for the last surviving brick shithouse, with beautiful attached wash house complete with plumbed in copper, behind our row of Edwardian maisonettes. They were a poignant piece of social history, the provision of one between every four housing units seen as recklessly profligate: now they're all decking and patio paving.
So we looked instead for the one truly romantic listed building near my home, an Egyptian pyramid mausoleum that the builder moved three times, complete with the body of his mistress in a magnificent leather, velvet and brass nailed coffin. "No Image Available" the website said. Hah! Dr Thurley was mortified.
But in truth almost anyone will turn up some treasure within a few streets of wherever they live in England.
The archive was created by more than 2,000 volunteers, mostly happy amateurs but including some professional photographers giving their spare time free. One lost his tripod when a gust of wind blew it off a pier, several were chased off by enraged private landowners, many put down spectacles to peer into the viewfinder and never found them again, one was bitten by a dog, another walked slap into a lamp-post while looking up for the best angle of a tall building.
Bob Cottrell, a retired engineer from Tyneside, hears the menacing distant roar of a vacuum cleaner. He is the most prolific contributor to the archive, almost 4,000 images to date.
He still has a few more to capture, though he has almost given up hope of finding a 17th century grave marker in a particularly nettly cemetery, but when the archive does close at the end of this week, he will be bereft.
"It has taken an awful lot of my time, but it has been the perfect excuse to get out of housework," he said. "I expect my wife will have a few jobs waiting for me now."
View our gallery of some of the Images of England here.
