Loft Conversions in South East London

What the housing stock means for your roof

We are based in Bromley, which puts most of south east London within half an hour of the yard. Twenty-one of our area pages sit inside this patch, and our own team surveys, designs and builds every one of them.

South east London is not one kind of house, and that is the thing that decides what your loft can become. The Victorian terraces through Lewisham, Peckham and East Dulwich are typically deep with a rear back addition, which is what makes an L-shape possible: the roof over the main house and the roof over the addition are joined into one floor, and you get two rooms and a bathroom out of it rather than a single room.

Move out towards Bromley, Bexley, Sidcup and Orpington and the stock changes to interwar semis, almost all of them built with a hipped side roof. A hipped roof wastes the end of the loft, because the ceiling slopes away on three sides instead of two. Building the end wall up square, which is what a hip to gable does, recovers that end and usually gets paired with a rear dormer to square off the back as well.

The practical consequence is that the same budget buys a different room depending on which street you are on. We would rather tell you that on the survey than sell you a conversion your roof does not suit.

Five planning authorities, and they do not all behave the same

South east London spans the London Boroughs of Bromley, Greenwich, Lewisham and Bexley, plus Southwark for the Dulwich and Peckham side. They are separate planning authorities with their own local policies, and that matters more than people expect.

Most rear dormers and hip to gables on ordinary houses fall under permitted development and need no full application at all. What changes that is a conservation area or an Article 4 direction, and south east London has a lot of both. Central Greenwich sits largely within a conservation area. Dulwich has extensive coverage and the Dulwich Estate scheme of management applies on top of it. Chislehurst has large conservation areas and a number of listed buildings.

Where a full application is needed we handle it, including the drawings and the structural calculations. What we will not do is tell you permitted development covers it and let you find out otherwise once the scaffold is up.

Building regulations apply either way

Planning permission asks whether you are allowed to change the outside of the building. Building regulations ask whether what you have built is safe, and that second one applies to every loft conversion in south east London without exception, including the ones that sail through under permitted development.

It covers the new floor structure, the fire escape route and fire doors, the head height over the staircase, and the insulation and ventilation. It is where most of the technical work on a conversion actually sits, and it is the most common reason a job done cheaply fails sign-off. We handle the calculations, the drawings and the building control sign-off as part of the job.