Here's an even more wild example - the city of Chicago was too low to the water, causing sanitation problems. So they moved the whole city, one building at a time... about six feet straight up. With the technology of 1850-65. While most of the buildings in question were in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Infrastructure projects of old fascinate me. I can't imagine this being done today. Same with things like the El, NYC subways, and the Eisenhower interstate system: the amount of overhead these projects would encounter (for both better and worse) would be prohibitive.

The classic "if we could put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon" situation.

A 12700-ton church was moved ~850m in 70s Czechoslovakia to make space for coal mining [0][1]. It wasn't in use during the move though. :)

The rest of the town was demolished, and a new one (with same name) was built nearby. Mining has stopped since and there's a giant lake in the old town's area now.

There are several videos about the event, but most of them with Czech commentary only… Still, it's interesting to at least skip around the video [2].

Aerial map of the location: https://en.mapy.cz/s/2pntC (you can switch to 19th century map via the "change map" button).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Assumption_of_th...

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/moved-church-of-most-kos...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maIddhfONrI

The Museum Hotel (3500 tons) in Wellington, New Zealand was moved 180 meters using 8 sets of train tracks, using 96 rail bogies.

The hotel wasn't kept operational, but they didn't strip anything from inside, they even left the bottles in the bar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Art_Hotel

I don't think it's that uncommon. A historic building near where I live was moved, and then people changed their mind and moved it again.

See: https://dailygazette.com/article/2013/05/04/historic-niskayu...

and: https://dailygazette.com/article/2017/09/13/this-is-cooler-t...

In the 70's a 7000-ton building was moved in Bogotá using steel rollers. It was cheaper to move than to demolish and rebuild. http://www.colombia.co/en/trade-with-colombia/innovation/cud...

There used to be a show in the US about moving houses - generally they were wooden houses and moved a mile or so to either a new part of town or another town. I think the huge wide (and pretty empty looking) roads helped - I can't think of many cases where you'd be able to do similar in the UK due to the narrow roads.

Plus I'd rather move a wooden house than a brick or even a stone one.

It's fairly common to relocate houses in New Zealand, up to a couple of hundred km away.

Wooden buildings built on piles used to be the standard construction method in New Zealand before poured concrete bases became the norm, so they're relatively easy to move: just chop the piles and jack it up onto a truck.

My parent's friends actually gave a house away for free. They were rebuilding, it it was cheaper to give the house away for free and have the new owners pay to get it relocated, rather than pay for demolition.

The Museum Hotel in Wellington was also moved in 1993.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/74342852/...

Legend has it my uncle bought his house for $1, cut it in half, paid the town to stop traffic for a day, and moved it a few blocks.

It depends on a lot of factors, I imagine. I stayed with a man in Iceland who had moved a family house across town when it became his new home for himself and his family.

When materials to build a new house are phenomenally expensive, and perhaps labor expensive as well, it becomes cheaper to deal with the logistics of moving an entire dwelling intact.