Extensions in Aldham

Extending in Aldham

507 people, no village, and the only concentrated part of the parish is a conservation area designated in 1969.

Aldham is a working farming parish rather than a place with a middle. The 2021 census recorded 507 residents spread across farmhouses, cottages and small groups of houses on the lanes between the A1124 and the fields. Part of the old parish went to Eight Ash Green when that civil parish was created out of four neighbours in 1949. It has never really been otherwise: the farmhouses were scattered through the parish, and when the medieval church was rebuilt in 1854 and 1855 it was physically moved about three quarters of a mile from what is now Church House Farm to the crossroads, because that was closer to where people actually were.

Colchester City Council is the planning authority, which is not something to assume from the map. Aldham sits close to the Braintree boundary and several villages in this corner are in a different district from their neighbours a mile away, as at White Colne. We confirm the authority against the address before anything else, because getting it wrong wastes weeks.

Ford Street, and the conservation area

The one dense part of the parish is also the oldest designation in it.

Ford Street is the hamlet where the road from Colchester crosses the River Colne, and the ford itself was historically half in Fordham and half in Aldham. It was designated a conservation area on 7 August 1969, which makes it one of the earliest in the Colchester district.

Inside the boundary the buildings are close together and old. The Old House is a sixteenth century H-plan house, jettied on its east front. Bridge House is seventeenth century with earlier framing inside it. Fordstreet Bridge itself is listed. The character is a tight street frontage rather than a green with cottages set back around it, which changes what can be done at the front of a building and what has to happen at the back.

Designation makes the land article 2(3) land under the permitted development order. That removes specific rights rather than the lot. Side extensions and rear extensions of more than one storey stop being permitted development. Cladding in render, timber, tile, stone or plastic stops being permitted development. A rear dormer stops being permitted development, because the class covering enlargement of the roof is excluded here.

A rooflight sitting in the plane of the existing slope is not removed. That right survives in a conservation area, front slope included, provided it projects no more than 150mm beyond the plane measured perpendicular and sits no higher than the highest part of the original roof. It is the single most useful thing to know about roofs in a place like this. Two further duties come with designation and neither concerns the house: taking down a boundary wall or gate above a modest height needs conservation area consent, and work to trees needs six weeks’ written notice to the council whether or not there is a preservation order.

Extending a timber framed house

Most of the old stock here is a frame with an infill, and almost nothing you know about a brick house applies to it.

A timber framed house is a structural frame carrying the loads, with panels between the timbers that carry nothing. There is no cavity, usually no damp proof course, and the whole building is designed to take in moisture and give it back. It sits on a sole plate near ground level, and it has been moving gently for four hundred years.

That has consequences for an extension, and they are practical rather than theoretical.

• You cannot cut into a frame member to take a bearing without knowing what that member is doing. Loads travel through a frame in ways that are not obvious from inside a plastered room, and the answer is usually to build the new structure to stand on its own and simply meet the old one.
• Sealing an old frame with cement render, modern plaster or a plastic membrane traps moisture in the timber. Lime, breathable insulation and a build-up designed to let the wall dry are not a heritage affectation here, they are what stops the frame rotting.
• The new work will be founded to modern depths on ground the old building has been sitting on for centuries. Old and new will not move together, so the junction between them gets designed as a junction rather than pretended away.
• Floors and openings are rarely level or square, and the drawings have to be measured off the building rather than assumed.

Where the house itself is listed, listed building consent is a separate permission dealing with the works to the building, inside as well as out. It is worth being clear that listing does not remove permitted development rights. That is a common belief and it is the wrong way round. What listing does is add a consent regime for works affecting the building’s special interest, and internal work that needs no planning permission at all can still need listed building consent.

The Colne, and where flood risk actually applies

The river runs through the bottom of the parish. What it means for a householder is narrower than people assume.

Properties in the valley bottom at Ford Street sit near the Colne, and the flood zones there are worth checking on the Environment Agency map before any design work starts.

The rule that catches people out is the one that does not apply. Householder extensions are treated as minor development in national planning guidance, so the sequential test and the exception test are not applied to them. You are not required to demonstrate that there is nowhere else in the district you could have built your kitchen. What can still be required, in Flood Zone 2 or 3, is a site-specific flood risk assessment showing the extension will be safe for its lifetime, and that is a proportionate document rather than a major exercise.

The exception is worth flagging because it is expensive to get wrong. Creating a separate dwelling within the curtilage, as opposed to an annexe that stays part of the house, falls outside that concession and is subject to the sequential test. If the plan is to house a relative independently, the way the proposal is framed matters a great deal. Our flood zones guide goes through it.

Ground conditions across a short distance

The valley floor and the plateau above it are different jobs, and they are four hundred metres apart.

Down at Ford Street the ground is river alluvium and gravel: soft, variable, sometimes with a high water table, and capable of producing a trench that will not stand up long enough to pour. Foundations there are frequently deeper than the ground appears to warrant, and the sensible answers include reinforced trench fill or, where the soft material is thick, piles.

Up on the higher ground the parish sits on glacial boulder clay over London Clay. That is shrinkable, so tree influence sets the depth, and the hedgerow oaks and field boundary trees that make this parish look the way it does are exactly the species that push a foundation down. Removing one is rarely the answer, because ground a mature tree has been drying for fifty years swells when the tree goes, and heave lifts a building rather than settling it.

The point is that a price quoted for one Aldham address is not a price for another. What the trial hole shows governs, and it is the item most likely to move the number.

Drainage off the mains

A dispersed parish means a good number of properties treating their own foul water.

Where a house is served by a septic tank or a package treatment plant rather than a sewer, the system and its drainage field are sized on the number of bedrooms the house has. Adding one changes the design population, and a field that was adequate for three bedrooms may not be adequate for four.

The general binding rules that allow a small domestic discharge without a permit assume the system is properly sized and maintained for what it serves. So an extension that adds sleeping accommodation is a drainage question as well as a building question, and the honest time to raise it is at survey, when the answer might be a larger plant or an extended field rather than a surprise at completion.

Lanes, deliveries and turning a lorry

Access is the quiet cost item on a parish of single track roads.

The A1124 through Ford Street narrows at the river crossing, and the lanes running off it into the parish are single track with passing places and soft verges. An articulated delivery cannot always get to the site, cannot always turn round when it does, and cannot stand in a lane while it is unloaded without stopping everything behind it.

None of that is a problem if it is planned. Smaller loads, a grab lorry rather than a tipper for muck away, materials stored on the plot rather than on the verge, and deliveries booked outside school traffic. It becomes a problem when a builder priced the job as though the site were in town.

What people build in Aldham

Rear and side additions to old houses, and outbuildings brought back into use.

The commonest brief is a rear extension to give an old cottage the kitchen and family space it was never designed for, usually set apart from the original in form and material rather than imitating it. On a timber framed house, a clearly modern addition with a glazed link is often an easier design argument than a pastiche wing, and it is honest about which part is which.

Barn and outbuilding conversions come second, and they are a different animal again, with their own structural and consent questions. An agricultural building brought into domestic use has to meet current Building Regulations for insulation, ventilation, fire and structure, and the frame that has carried a hay loft comfortably for two centuries may need work before it carries a bedroom floor.

Loft work is less common here. The roofs are hand cut and irregular, headroom is unpredictable from one bay to the next, and on the older buildings the historic interest often sits in the roof structure itself, which makes cutting into it the most sensitive thing you could propose.

Questions we get asked in Aldham

Which council decides my application?

Colchester City Council. Neighbouring parishes in this corner sit in different districts, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming from where you shop.

My house is listed. Have I lost permitted development?

No. Listing brings in listed building consent for works affecting the building’s special interest. It does not itself remove permitted development rights, and the two regimes run alongside each other.

Do I need a flood risk assessment?

Possibly, if you are in Flood Zone 2 or 3. You will not need the sequential test for a householder extension, because that is not applied to minor development.

Can I render the old part to match the new?

On a timber framed building, not in cement. A breathable lime render is the right specification, and inside a conservation area the material is a planning question as well as a technical one.

Getting a price for an Aldham extension

We are based at West Bergholt, a few miles east along the Colne, so this is a short run rather than a long one.

Our team comes out and surveys properly: the frame where there is one, the ground on your particular plot, the trees, the drainage type, the access for a lorry, and the designation and authority position on your specific address. Most people who call us already have drawings and permission and want a builder to price the work and build it. That is the ordinary job here, and we are glad to work to somebody else’s plans. Where the drawings do not exist yet, we bring in the technician who draws it and the structural engineer who calculates it, we manage the application and any listed building consent, we notify Building Control, and we run the job as main contractor.

We carry £2m public liability cover and everything is built to current Building Regulations, through to your completion certificate. The survey and the quotation cost nothing.