Five beautiful ruins

Designed by 19th-century architect William Wilkins, the Grade I-listed Greek Revival building that houses Yorkshire Museum is far from ruined, but the surrounding grounds are home to one of the country's most beautiful ruins. The museum was built on the site of St Mary's Abbey, a ruined Benedictine monastery that was once the richest abbey in the north of England. The surviving ruins date back to the late 13th-century rebuild, after a rioting group of disputing monks left St Mary's to establish the nearby Fountains Abbey.

Set within the Royal Borough of Greenwich in London, Eltham has been the site of a palace for over 700 years, since the Bishop of Durham gave his residence to Edward II in 1305. Eltham was a royal residence from the 14th to the 16th century, hosting historical figures from the Byzantine emperor Palaeologus to a youthful Henry VIII, who impressed the scholar Erasmus while living at the palace. The palace eventually fell into disrepair, but its ruins were incorporated into the beautiful Art Deco house built on the site by the Courtauld family, creating a stunning hybrid of old and new.

When the young poet Lord Byron inherited the family home in 1798, he found Newstead a dilapidated wreck, the result of a family feud that had culminated in one of his ancestors laying waste to the house (and over 2,000 of its deer), leaving it to fall into disrepair. Byron romanticised the ruins in his poetry, writing: 'Thro thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle; Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay.' While much of the building has been rebuilt, many of the ruins have been left intact – the wind still blows through Newstead's battlements.

At ground level, Guildhall Art Gallery is a hidden gem of a London art gallery. Established in 1886 as 'a Collection of Art Treasures worthy of the capital city', its collection includes works dating from 1670 to Mark Titchner's 2012 sculpture Plenty and Progress, acquired in 2013 with Art Fund support. Head downstairs, however, and you'll discover one of London's best-kept secrets: a remarkably well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, once the site of wild animal fights, public executions and gladiatorial combat. The ruins were undiscovered for centuries before eventually being unearthed by archaeologists working on the site of the new gallery building in 1988.