Why can't they be saved?

Says Georgian Society chairman Robert Barger: "It's a mismatch with the aspirations of planning policy. We're looking for housing in the centre of cities, yet you're seeing ready-made housing with some historic value potentially being demolished."

Take the 1820s Georgian terrace in Victoria's Tachbrook Triangle. Ten properties are all that remain of Georgian Vauxhall Bridge Road, owing to war-time bombing. Yet, along with the Triangle's parade of shops, they were compulsorily purchased by Westminster council and twice scheduled for demolition; first for a 1980s road scheme, then to allow a commercial development that included housing and a health centre.

But while the shops were demolished in 2001, the Georgian Society and Save Britain's Heritage managed to get the terrace listed Grade II before the bulldozers went in.

Westminster unsuccessfully tried to have the properties de-listed. For now, they remain forlornly boarded up and there are fears the council may declare them dangerous structures, demolishing them and retaining only their façades.

Tim Whittaker of the Spitalfields Trust agrees that the terrace, in its current state, is at risk. But, he says, "We've been right around the buildings and they're structurally OK. They would be very nice little houses for anyone."-The Trust, which has restored more than 50 Georgian buildings in London, has offered to repair them.

And locals would like to see them restored. Paul Josefowski, who has lived in Victoria all his 40 years, believes the terrace should be incorporated in any new development: "We could certainly do with a lot more housing in this area," he says.

And he points to a similar terrace of 10 Grade II listed Georgian houses in nearby Gillingham Street that have been beautifully restored as part of a development by St Julian's Estate. But Westminster will say only: "We are looking at a number of potential ways to develop the site, and the future use of these buildings is still under consideration."

A Georgian terrace in the midst of the City's glass monoliths is a rarity, and, considering the emphasis on mixed-use, you might expect it to be prized. But demolition looms over six 1810 properties in Sun Street near Broadgate, with the likely redevelopment of the Sun Street-Earl Street block.

Attempts by the Spitalfields Trust and the Georgian Society to have the terrace listed have failed; English Heritage and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which is involved in the listing of buildings, claim the properties have been too greatly altered, although one features a rare, intact Regency shop front.

Again, the Spitalfields Trust would gladly restore the buildings. "It's very odd," says Whittaker, "in that there are far poorer examples they are quite happy to list."

Charles Wagner of English Heritage, however, claims the terrace is protected anyway by being in a conservation area, and says it and the local authority, Hackney, are lobbying the group of developers that own it: "They need to justify why these buildings can't be retained," Wagner says. However, HDG, the group's agent, is "not at liberty to comment on what our policy might be for those properties."

One way of saving Georgian homes is to sell them to private buyers. That is what Walter Micklethwaite hoped London University's Queen Mary College would do when it decided in 2002 to dispose of Nos 2 to 12 Walden Street, Whitechapel, which are Grade II listed. He and two friends were prepared to offer £190,000 each for numbers 8 to 12, and other homebuyers were interested in the remaining houses.

But auctioneers advised selling the terrace as a single lot. "As a publicly funded institution," says a spokeswoman, "Queen Mary is required to achieve the best selling price in such a case." Developer Crownwall bought the terrace for £1.55 million and, although it sold two houses to another developer, the terrace has remained boarded up and is now on the English Heritage Buildings At Risk register.

Crownwall could not be contacted for comment, but Tim Whittaker, who reckons restoring each house would cost £70,000, believes it caught a cold: "I can just see the houses sitting there and waiting and getting worse."

Tower Hamlets conservation officer Vicki Lambert is negotiating with the developers and hopes to see the houses restored as family homes. She agrees with Whittaker: "If the properties had been auctioned individually it's possible a quicker solution to their refurbishment would have been reached."

Micklethwaite certainly feels ordinary buyers would have done a better job. "It's just what the area needs, a determined influx of private individuals, not developers. But developers have big chequebooks."

'Vauxhall has passed this building by for generations'

It was once home to the Duke of Brunswick, but now it is hemmed in by advertising hoardings, multi-laned traffic thunders past its boarded-up faÃade and, to its left and rear, a massive St George development already dwarfs it and threatens to swamp it utterly with a proposed 50-storey tower.

Yet Vauxhall's Brunswick House, with its pediment and columned semi-elliptical coade-stone porch, is a finely proportioned Georgian mansion house, built in 1758 and listed Grade II*. Restored, it could be a millionaire's mansion again.

But confusion over how to save Brunswick House may have conditioned a certain inertia towards finding its owner to enforce repairs.

"Vauxhall has passed this building by," says Malcolm Wood of English Heritage, "and has done so for five or six generations." The Victorians built a gas works behind it, then in the 1950s came the Nine Elms Cold Store. Even so, Mary Acland-Hood of The Vauxhall Society wants the house restored for community use. There has even been talk of moving it to Camberwell, although conservation bodies unanimously reject this as tantamount to demolishing the building.

Meanwhile, everyone from the Spitalfields Trust and the Georgian Society to Andrew Sawden, the Lambeth councillor responsible for planning, has expressed concern about the property's deterioration. This month it goes on the Buildings At Risk register.

Since it was bought by the London and South Western Railway in 1850, and was occupied until recently by a railwaymen's social club, it was believed to be still owned by a branch of the railways and as such would not feature in the Land Registry, instigated at recently as 1940. But Homes & Property can reveal Brunswick House was sold at rail privatisation in 1996. The freehold changed hands again for £400,000 in 2000; it was sold to two individuals, who leased it to three others.

A spokeswoman for St George, which denies it tried to buy the property, says: "The owners are holding on to it for a long-term investment." But so far the only suggestion for restoring this investment has come via an advertising company offering to wrap a hoarding around it to finance the work. However, now Homes & Property has been able to give English Heritage details of the owners, Lambeth can serve them with an order forcing repairs.