Extensions in Boxted

Extending in Boxted

A parish of two halves on the slope down to the Stour, with a house type you will not find anywhere else around Colchester.

Boxted sits about five miles north of Colchester, on ground that falls from around forty-five metres at the church and Boxted Hall to roughly ten metres in the Stour valley below. The 2021 census counted 1,427 people, scattered rather than gathered. It is a parish with no single centre, and the ground under it changes as you go down the hill.

Two things make building here unlike building in the villages either side. The first is that a large part of the housing is not conventional village housing at all, but the surviving cottages of an Edwardian smallholdings colony. The second is that the bottom of the parish sits inside a nationally designated landscape and the top of it does not.

Two Boxteds

Which end of the parish you are in decides almost everything about the job.

Boxted Cross, along Straight Road, is where most of the modern housing is. Straight Road exists because the heath was enclosed and a road was driven across it, which is why it runs the way it does, and the twentieth century development followed it.

The church end is a different place: St Peter’s, Boxted Hall and the older buildings, on the steeper ground running down towards the water meadows and the river. Between them are the heath-edge hamlets that grew up by the sixteenth century, at Workhouse Hill and elsewhere, along lanes like Cage Lane and Church Road, which was a ridgeway long before it was a road.

Three different settlement patterns, three different sets of houses, and one parish council covering all of it.

Who decides

Colchester City Council, with a made neighbourhood plan that has been in force for the better part of a decade.

Applications go to Colchester City Council. Boxted is a civil parish in the City of Colchester district and its parish council is a consultee rather than a decision maker.

The Boxted Neighbourhood Plan was made in December 2016, which puts it among the earlier ones in the district. A made neighbourhood plan forms part of the statutory development plan, so its policies are among those an application here is determined against, alongside the local plan. For a householder extension the plan rarely decides the outcome on its own. It does shape what an officer comments on, particularly where a proposal is visible from the open landscape.

The smallholdings, and the houses they left behind

Sixty-seven pairs of cottages on very large plots, built in one go in 1906, and still the most distinctive housing in the parish.

In 1906 the Salvation Army bought Priory Farm and around four hundred acres at Boxted Heath, funded by a hundred thousand pound gift, and divided it into sixty-seven smallholdings of roughly four and a half to seven acres each. Semi detached cottages were built to go with them: three bedrooms, a living room, a parlour and a scullery, with a toolhouse and a pigsty outside. Tenants came largely from east London to work the land.

The scheme did not take. By 1912 a good number of the cottages stood empty. Essex County Council bought the estate in 1916, ex-servicemen were placed there by 1922 with much the same result, and in the 1950s many of the holdings were sold to the people then farming them. The pairs are still there, most of them altered and extended several times over.

What that history leaves you is an unusual combination: a small, cheaply built Edwardian semi detached cottage sitting on a plot measured in acres.

What that means when you extend one

The plot gives you room the rules do not, and it is the house type rather than the land that sets the limits.

The rule most people run into elsewhere is the one that stops extensions and outbuildings covering more than half the land around the original house. On a plot of several acres that ceiling is effectively never reached, which is a genuine freedom.

The rule that does bite is the house type. Permitted development treats a semi detached house differently from a detached one: a single storey rear extension may project three metres rather than four, and the larger home extension prior approval route allows six rather than eight. A smallholding cottage is one of a pair, so it takes the lower figures however much land comes with it. Our answer page on how deep a single storey extension can be sets out the measuring points, and our guide to extending a semi detached house covers the rest.

Being one of a pair also brings the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 into most jobs here, for cutting into the shared wall, for building up to the line, and for excavating deeper than next door’s footings within three metres of them. On cottages built quickly and economically in 1906, that last trigger applies more often than people expect, because the original footings are shallow and the new ones will not be.

The third point is history. Almost all of these cottages have been extended before, sometimes repeatedly, and permitted development allowances are measured against the house as originally built rather than as you bought it. Establishing what was there in 1906 is the first job, not the last. There is more in our guide to what the original house means.

The designated landscape at the bottom of the hill

The Dedham Vale designation follows the Stour and its slopes, which puts part of this parish inside it and part of it outside.

Dedham Vale was designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1970 and renamed a National Landscape in November 2023. The legal designation is unchanged, and planning documents continue to use the AONB term, so nothing about the rules moved with the name.

The boundary follows the river valley, so it is the low ground and the slopes at the north of the parish that fall within it rather than the housing along Straight Road. Great Horkesley, the next parish west, is split by the same line. Where a property is inside, it becomes what the legislation calls article 2(3) land, and several permitted development rights disappear: side extensions, rear extensions of more than one storey, cladding, and roof enlargements such as dormers all become planning applications, and the larger rear extension prior approval route is not available at all. Rooflights set within the plane of the existing slope are covered by a separate class with no such exclusion, so those survive.

Being outside the line is not the end of the matter either. An application on land next to a designated landscape can still be assessed for its effect on that landscape, particularly on a slope where a roof is visible from the valley. In practice, on the higher ground the conversation is about massing and roof form, and it is a conversation that usually produces a better building than the alternative.

The boundary is a mapped line rather than a village edge, and we check it against the address rather than the postcode.

Building on a slope

Falling ground changes the foundation, the drainage and, less obviously, the arithmetic.

On sloping ground a foundation is stepped down the hill in increments rather than poured level, which uses more concrete and takes longer. Where the fall is sharp, part of the new structure ends up retaining ground, and a retaining wall is a designed element with drainage behind it rather than a thicker wall.

The arithmetic point catches people out. Heights under permitted development are measured from the highest part of the ground next to the building, not from an average and not from the low side. On a plot that falls away, an extension that looks modest from uphill can be well over the limit measured properly, and one that looks tall from the garden may be perfectly compliant. It gets measured before it gets drawn.

Access matters more on a slope as well. Concrete has to reach the bottom of a fall, spoil has to come back up it, and a wet winter on a clay lane can stop both.

Water, springs and the meadows

A parish with springs running through it and a floodplain at the bottom.

The ground here is glacial drift, a mixture of sand, gravel and loam, with London Clay showing where the valleys cut into it, the same plateau deposit that runs south to Myland. Springs feed the small streams running off the higher ground, the Black brook among them, and they were the reason for the water meadows below. Around three hundred acres of meadow lay along the river in 1838, and floods there were still uncontrollable into the 1870s.

Two practical consequences follow. Down by the river, flood zone is a real question for a small number of properties, and where it applies a householder extension is treated as minor development, so the response is in the construction rather than in the paperwork: floor level set deliberately, a solid floor, and materials low down that will dry out. Our guide to flood zones and extensions in Essex goes through it.

Up the hill, the question is not the river but the run off coming down to you and the water already in the ground. A spring line crossing a plot, or an old field drain nobody has recorded, will find an open trench quickly. Whether a soakaway will work is settled by a percolation test, and on loam over clay the answer is often that it will not.

Off the mains, and getting to the plot

Scattered settlement means private drainage and private drives, and both change the price.

Properties out on the lanes and on the old holdings are commonly on a septic tank discharging to a drainage field, or on a package treatment plant. Systems are sized on the number of bedrooms, so adding one can push an existing tank past its capacity and require the drainage field to be enlarged or the unit replaced. A septic tank may not discharge to a ditch or watercourse under the general binding rules for small sewage discharges, and where an old one still does, that is dealt with rather than inherited.

Access is the other cost nobody quotes for. A long unmade drive is fine for a car and unkind to a fully loaded lorry. Where a delivery cannot reach the plot, everything is double handled, and double handling is time. It is far better established at survey than discovered by a driver refusing to come down.

What people build in Boxted

Space at the back, a small original footprint, and work that follows both.

Rear extensions to open a cottage plan into a single kitchen and living room lead, because the original rooms are small and the garden is not. Two storey side extensions come next on the plots that allow them, outside the designated area. Annexes and detached garden buildings follow, and on the large holdings they are the natural answer to a family that has changed shape, subject to the distance rules where the designation applies.

Garage and outbuilding conversions round it off. There are a lot of old structures on these plots, and some of them are worth converting while others are worth clearing.

Questions we get asked in Boxted

Am I in the AONB?

Part of the parish is and part is not, and the boundary follows the valley rather than the roads. It is checked on your address as the first thing we do, because it changes the planning route.

My plot is huge. Can I build what I like?

The size of the plot removes one limit and none of the others. The depth allowance still depends on whether the house is detached, and on one of the old smallholding pairs it is not.

Do I need to know what the cottage looked like in 1906?

You need to know what it looked like when it was first built, yes, because that is what the allowances are measured against. Old permissions, historic mapping and the council’s records usually settle it.

Will the lane take a lorry?

Sometimes, and in February often not. It is worked out at survey and priced accordingly rather than raised as an extra later.

Getting a price for a Boxted extension

We are at West Bergholt, a few miles round to the west, so Boxted is close enough that we can come and stand on the ground rather than talk about it.

Our team comes out and looks at the fall of the land, the drainage arrangement, what the original cottage was before anyone touched it, where the designated boundary sits and how a lorry is going to get in. 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 handle the application with Colchester City Council, we notify Building Control, and we run the job as main contractor.

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