Historic environment sites for 2025 and 2026
Published: Wednesday 1 Mar 2023
We’re delighted to announce the following specified historic sites for our GCSE History (8145) exams in both 2025 and 2026. These are covered in the historic environment element of the British depth studies in our GCSE specification.
The specified sites for 2025 are:
- Norman England, c1066–c1100: Durham Cathedral
- Medieval England, the reign of Edward I, 1272–1307: Stokesay Castle, Shropshire
- Elizabethan England, c1568–1603: Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
- Restoration England, 1660–1685: Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The specified sites for 2026 are:
- Norman England, c1066–c1100: Pevensey Castle, East Sussex
- Medieval England: the reign of Edward I, 1272–1307: Caernarfon Castle, Gwynedd
- Elizabethan England, c1568–1603: The Globe Theatre
- Restoration England, 1660–1685: Ham House, Richmond
You might recognise these sites as ones we’ve used in the past, and there are also ones we’ve set in previous series. We’re revisiting familiar sites for 2025 and 2026 based on your feedback to our survey last spring, to help make this part of the specification more manageable for you to teach and your students to learn.
Resource packs
To help you teach the specified sites, we’re making a few updates and improvements to our 2025 and 2026 resource packs that will help you prepare your students for the exams. The updated resource packs for 2025 will be released on Centre Services in the 2023 autumn term.
As a reminder, we have information about the 2023 and 2024 specified sites. We’ll release details of the 2027 specified sites later in the year.
