They stare out from the page forlornly, pitiful shells with only the faintest trace of their former glory: once-proud Georgian houses with a hang-dog look, and chocolate-box cottages that look perfect at first glance, but on closer examination have holes in their roofs and crumbling brickwork. Screw up your eyes and you can see what they could look like — but you can also imagine the sheer money and hard work required to realise that potential.

The properties feature in the Buildings at Risk register, published each year by Save Britain’s Heritage, an architectural charity. This year’s catalogue, entitled All We Need Is Love and available this week, includes 106 of them: everything from barns to breweries, manor houses to post offices, police stations to mills, all in dire need of TLC. (This is in addition to the 1,000 or more buildings from previous catalogues listed on the charity’s website.)

Many of them have been on the radar for years; all have been identified and sent in by people who would like to see them habitable once more. “The idea is to find an owner who will care for a building, put money into it and restore it, rather than allow it to sit there rotting and deteriorating,” says Catherine Townsend, who oversees the register for the charity. “It’s astonishing that, each year, we unearth so many buildings that are worthy of attention.”

Among the highlights are Golden Grove, a 19th-century mansion in Carmarthenshire; High House, a timber-framed farmhouse in Essex; Juniper House, a 17th-century former rectory in Cambridgeshire; and Brookside, a dilapidated stone house in Gloucestershire.

Also on the list is 2 St George’s Place, near the seafront in Brighton, a Grade II- listed, bow-fronted late-Georgian townhouse. At £495,000, the property, on sale through Ellis & Partners (01273 771393, ellis-partners.co.uk), seems a steal — but there are complications. It has been vacant and boarded up since 2001 because of a dispute with planners, who have insisted that the basement, ground and first floors should be commercial (although the second and third floors are residential).

Fancy a serious renovation project? Flax Mill, in Castle Cary, Somerset, is one of the best-preserved flax mills in the southwest, but has been empty for a number of years. It is on sale for £380,000, with permission to convert the lower floor into work units and the middle floor into two residential units (Symonds & Sampson; 01935 423526, symondsandsampson.co.uk). Or how about Grade II*-listed Balsam House, in Wincanton, Somerset, which has lain empty for several years and has been boarded up and badly vandalised. It is on sale for £720,000 through Stags (01935 475000, stags.co.uk).

To make things more complicated, only a few of the buildings featured, includig those listed above, are available through estate agents. In most cases, the register gives only the contact details for a council conservation officer or other local official involved with the buildings. They should help a potential purchaser to liaise with the owner, but even then matters are not always straightforward. The reason some places have lingered on the list for years is that nobody knows who owns them — an extraordinary situation in a country obsessed with buying property and doing it up.

Take Grappenhall Rectory, in Cheshire. A handsome cream stuccoed building dating from about 1830, it is at the centre of a conservation area in a historic, picturesque village. Nobody knows why it has been empty for so long, but it has fallen into ruin. Interested parties can contact Christine Carruthers at Warrington borough council (01925 442834).

Or how about the Old Post Office, a pretty, wisteria-covered 18th-century cottage in West Ashling, West Sussex? Although the windows are boarded up and the paint is peeling, it is easy to see its potential as a charming country home. The local authority has been trying to trace the owners, so far without success. For more details, speak to Dr Ian Wightman, historic buildings adviser at Chichester district council (01243 785166).

What should you expect if you do manage to get your hands on one of the buildings on offer? For a start, you should prepare for the worst. When Tony Pache, 58, a former salesman for the construction giant Caterpillar, first laid eyes on his tiny thatched cottage near Lincoln in 2002, his reaction was “never in a million years”. The Grade II-listed building was in a state of collapse, with bulging walls, rotting thatch and a tarpaulin over the roof. “The back garden was a jungle,” he recalls. “It was a machete job.”

Pache was up for the challenge — he was already living in a caravan while rebuilding a farmhouse about 15 miles away. So he and his wife, Jeanette, 55, a receptionist at the local newspaper, put the farmhouse project to one side and bought the cottage, which had been languishing on the Buildings at Risk Register since 1996, for £40,000.

They spent the next 2½ years almost completely rebuilding it, replacing most of the timber frame and using the traditional local “mud and stud” method for the walls, as well as rethatching the roof. They also knocked down a dilapidated Victorian extension at the back and replaced it with a new one.

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