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Welcome back me - a long time absent. I am looking for a formal / legal definition of a "workplace" if anyone is able to point me in a direction = either in primary / secondary legislation or in determined case law, including any from generations ago. Context is that I am working with staff at a musem of historic buildings in which the employer is claiming that inside each historic building is not a "workplace" and therefore doesn't need to maintain "reasonable" temperatures. I can happily quote chapter and verse for modern buildings but this is a bit of a different proposition. Grateful for any advice. Martyn
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Rank: Super forum user 
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Sorry a museum of historic buildings or a museum in an historic building? The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992
“workplace” means, subject to paragraph (2), any premises or part of premises which are not domestic premises and are made available to any person as a place of work, and includes—
(a) any place within the premises to which such person has access while at work; and (b) any room, lobby, corridor, staircase, road or other place used as a means of access to or egress from that place of work or where facilities are provided for use in connection with the place of work other than a public road Now I suspect you may have issues if the building is listed with any attempt to install heating & ventilation and if sufficiently old with the activity being at unreasonable cost. The Building Regulations are not retrospective and some of the newer regulations e.g. Construction Products specifically exempt the historic.
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 2 users thanked Roundtuit for this useful post.
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Rank: Super forum user
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Sorry a museum of historic buildings or a museum in an historic building? The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992
“workplace” means, subject to paragraph (2), any premises or part of premises which are not domestic premises and are made available to any person as a place of work, and includes—
(a) any place within the premises to which such person has access while at work; and (b) any room, lobby, corridor, staircase, road or other place used as a means of access to or egress from that place of work or where facilities are provided for use in connection with the place of work other than a public road Now I suspect you may have issues if the building is listed with any attempt to install heating & ventilation and if sufficiently old with the activity being at unreasonable cost. The Building Regulations are not retrospective and some of the newer regulations e.g. Construction Products specifically exempt the historic.
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2 users thanked Roundtuit for this useful post.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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Hi Martyn The definition in the Workplace Regulations includes the word "work" and as that is not defined in the Regulations you have to default to the definition in the parent legislation. So, Section 52 of HSWA defines "work" and "at work". In terms of case law, much of it is from long ago, and most of it is not specifically associated with H&S cases, but rather issues such as other employment rights. Unless your organisation doesn't think it employs anyone then it is going to have great difficulty in portraying the place where its staff do their daily tasks as being done in a "workplace" inside or outside (or both), and hence for an indoor (in particular) "workplace" they need to ensure that the workplace is at a reasonable temperature. However, what might be "reasonable" will depend on many variables one of which is that the premises may be historic and subject to restrictions on what can and cannot be done in terms of installing "plant" (a term defined in Section 53 of HSWA) to heat or cool the "workplace". ....and when the parallel provisions of e.g. the Factories Act 1961 and Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963 were consolidated into the Workplace (HSW) Regs 1992, greater flexiibility was written in to what constitured a "reasonable" temperature in terms of a minimum. Which means that you need to consider multiple variables including e.g. how long a person works in any area within a historic building and how easy it is for them to go to an another area to get warm (or cool). Relying on the legislation isn't going to help you that much on this one.
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Rank: Forum user
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Many thanks for the responses which are pretty much as I was thinking. To put the situation in better context, the employer is a museum which has a combination of modern buildings housing galleries of a wide range of displays. There are also a significant number of small historic buildings that have been moved onto the site within a parkland setting - every building is a separate entity in its own right. Every building has its own heating and / or cooling system - all in-keeping with the time period of that building and could range from log fires to coal fires through to underfloor heating systems sntstalled when the building was built, relocated to site or fitted retrospectively. Employees are required to be stationed in the buildings and the stories being presented to me by the staff are that
- museum curators want to limit the size of fires to simply provide an illustration of what life was like in that period - in part to reduce heating costs but primarly to avoid drying out of the displays - no consideration of the temperatures within the building in winter and no obvious assessments being made of the impact on workers;
- one building has an underfloor heating area of some 40ftx40ft (a giant horizontal radiator!!) and the employer is claiming that it is not possible to lower the temperature or even turn it off on even the hottest days. Ten days ago I measured the floor temperature at 30.4C on the hottest day of the year so far - air temperature outside was a mellow 24.8C
Onward and upward, thanks again guys Martyn Edited by user 29 June 2025 11:12:44(UTC)
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