Extensions in Cressing

Extending in Cressing

A parish of scattered greens between Braintree and Witham, with a small conservation area that is not where most people assume it is.

Cressing is a civil parish rather than a single village. It holds the old village around All Saints church, the settlement at Tye Green, the hamlet at Hawbush Green, and farmland in between, with the railway station on the Braintree branch line at the western edge. The 2021 census recorded 1,988 people across the lot.

Applications are decided by Braintree District Council, and Cressing has a parish council which is consulted on them. Both matter, and so does the fact that this parish contains several distinct places with genuinely different constraints. The right answer to “do I need permission” at Hawbush Green is not the same as the right answer on Church Road.

Settlement here is dispersed, and that is the point

North Essex villages cluster around a green or around the church rather than forming one centre, and Cressing is a clear example of it.

The council’s own conservation area appraisal makes the observation directly: it is a feature of this landscape that settlement is dispersed, generally gathered either around a green, locally a Tye, or around the parish church. Cressing has both patterns and they sit a mile or more apart.

For a homeowner the consequence is practical. The designation, the plot shapes, the drainage arrangements and the archaeological sensitivity all change between one part of the parish and another, and none of it can be inferred from the address alone. We establish the position on the specific plot before anything is drawn, every time.

The conservation area is small, linear, and east of the village

Designated in 1981 and appraised in 2009, it follows two roads rather than surrounding a centre.

The Cressing Conservation Area was designated on 22 October 1981, and Braintree District Council adopted a character appraisal and management plan for it in 2009, which the older designation at Stisted still lacks. The boundary runs along Church Road and The Street, east of the village proper, with Polecat Road forming the western side and two small greens breaking up the line.

The appraisal describes the predominant building type as detached timber framed structures of two to three bays with clay tiled roofs and a strong horizontal emphasis. External chimney stacks, panelled pargetting on the render, weatherboarding and low flint and brick walls are named as the local features. The landmark buildings are All Saints church, which is Grade I and built of brick and flint, the fifteenth century former public house known as the Horse Shoes, the pair of cottages beside it that began as one house of about 1500, and the Rook Hall farmhouse complex to the west, which dates from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

Inside that boundary the land is article 2(3) land under the permitted development order, and designation has already taken a slice out of what can be done without applying: the side extension, the rear extension of more than one storey, cladding the walls, and any enlargement of the roof, which means any dormer. What it leaves is most of Class A, including the single storey rear extension that the majority of enquiries here are about, and rooflights in the plane of the existing slope, which survive because the class covering other roof alterations carries no exclusion on designated land. Those carry conditions of their own: no more than 150mm beyond the plane, no higher than the highest part of the original roof, and obscure glazed where they face sideways. Our guide to conservation areas sets the full list out.

Knowing precisely what designation leaves you matters more in Cressing than in most villages, because of what the council’s own appraisal went on to recommend about the rest.

The Article 4 recommendation in the appraisal

The 2009 document recommended that the council consider going further. A recommendation is not a direction, and the difference is worth understanding.

Braintree’s appraisal for Cressing found that the character of the area was being eroded partly through a lack of control over minor development, and recommended that where that had happened the council consider making an Article 4 direction removing the whole of Part 1, Classes A to H, from dwellings within the conservation area.

Nothing about a recommendation in an appraisal makes a direction exist. The procedure for making one is separate and involves its own consultation and publicity. No Article 4 direction is recorded over the village on the national planning data, and a blank record is not the same thing as a clearance: authorities publish to it at different rates, and a search returning nothing does not distinguish between nothing existing and nothing having been published. It costs nothing to have Braintree District Council confirm the position against your specific address, and given what the appraisal recommended, this is a village where that call is genuinely worth making.

One thing to budget for if a direction does apply to you. Where planning permission is needed only because an Article 4 direction has removed the right, the ordinary householder fee is still payable: the exemption that used to cover exactly that case was repealed in England in January 2018. It costs you time, drawings and the fee. Our page on Article 4 directions explains how they are made and how to check.

The front boundary is part of the application

Hedges, verges and low flint walls are named in the appraisal as character. What you do at the front of the plot is assessed alongside what you build at the back.

The appraisal is specific about this. Native hedges, grass verges and low brick and brick and flint walls form the boundaries along Church Road and Polecat Road, and it identifies wide uninterrupted areas of tarmac and concrete block paving as having a detrimental effect on the character of the area. It also records the erosion of soft verges by parking as an ongoing problem.

An extension almost always brings a parking consequence, because another bedroom means another car and a bigger house means more visitors. In most places that is dealt with afterwards. Here it is part of the scheme, and a drawing that shows a generous new room and a sea of block paving in front of it is arguing against itself.

There is a national rule underneath the local judgement, and it applies everywhere rather than only in the conservation area. Laying more than five square metres of hard surface in the front garden of a house requires planning permission unless the surface is permeable or is laid so that water runs to a permeable area within the plot. Gravel, permeable block paving and a soakaway strip all satisfy it. Impermeable tarmac straight to the kerb does not.

Essex Till, and where the water actually goes

Thick chalky boulder clay under everything, and a brook culverted along the road.

The appraisal names the local geology as Essex Till, the deposit of chalky boulder clay left after the last glaciation, which is what makes the farmland here good and what makes a foundation a calculation rather than a standard detail. It also explains the buildings: there is no useful local stone, so flint, clunch and septaria were reserved for status buildings like the church, and everything else was timber framed and rendered, with brick arriving in quantity only in the nineteenth century.

Clay of that kind shrinks and swells seasonally, and trees drive it. Depth is worked out from the species, the mature height and the distance to the new work, and the hedgerow oaks along these lanes are precisely the trees people underestimate, because a hedge line reads as a boundary rather than as a mature specimen. Our page on foundations covers how the depth is arrived at and what the alternatives are when a trench stops being economic.

Surface water is the other half of the ground question, and it behaves badly here. Cressing Brook runs broadly parallel to the road on its western side and is culverted along part of it, and clay does not soak away. A soakaway sized by a rule of thumb will fill up and stay full through the winter, so a new roof and a new patio need a drainage design rather than an assumption, and on some plots that means a connection or an attenuated discharge rather than a hole full of crates.

Drainage that never reaches a sewer

Away from the built-up parts, a good many houses treat their own foul water, and an extension changes the sums.

If your property drains to a septic tank or a package treatment plant rather than to a mains sewer, which outside the village centres in a parish like this one is a real possibility, then adding accommodation is not a neutral act. The system is sized for a number of bedrooms, and adding one increases the design loading. A septic tank discharging to a drainage field falls under the general binding rules, which set out where the drainage field can be in relation to buildings, boundaries, watercourses and abstraction points.

Two things follow for an extension. You cannot build over a drainage field or a soakaway, and its location is often not where the vendor thought it was. And where the existing arrangement is already marginal, an extension is the moment it gets looked at properly, which is better discovered at survey than at completion.

Archaeology is a real cost line in this parish

Cressing has been occupied continuously for a very long time, and the ground records it.

The Knights Templar were granted land at Cressing in 1137, the first grant of its kind in England, and built their preceptory away from the existing village. What survives there is extraordinary: the Barley Barn of about 1220 and the Wheat Barn of about 1280, both Grade I listed and protected as an ancient monument, bought by Essex County Council in 1987 and open to the public. The site sits south of the conservation area rather than within it.

The wider parish is just as archaeologically active. Crop marks in the surrounding fields show field boundaries and enclosures of undetermined date, investigation around the church has produced evidence of settlement going back to around 4000 BC, and an excavation in 2020 uncovered an Iron Age settlement of more than seventeen roundhouses.

For a householder that translates into one thing. Braintree District Council takes archaeological advice from the county’s specialists, and on a sensitive site a permission can carry a condition requiring a written scheme of investigation and archaeological monitoring while the foundations are dug. That has a cost, it has a programme effect, and it is the item nobody includes in a quote. It does not stop a normal extension to a normal house. It is worth knowing about before the digger is booked.

What people build here

Generous plots, small original houses and a spread-out parish produce a particular set of jobs.

Single storey rear extensions dominate, usually pitched rather than flat where the house is older, opening a kitchen into the garden and taking a utility off it. Plot depth is rarely the limiting factor in this parish, which is a genuine advantage over working in Braintree itself.

Outbuildings are the second strand: garden rooms, home offices, cart lodges and the conversion of existing stores and stables. On an undesignated plot much of that falls under the outbuildings class rather than counting as an extension, which is a different and often easier route.

Barn conversions turn up regularly in the farmland around the greens, and they carry a specific trap. Where a building was converted to a house under the agricultural to residential prior approval route, the permission commonly carries a condition removing permitted development rights from the resulting dwelling. The decision notice is the first document to read, not the last.

Questions we get asked in Cressing

Am I in the conservation area?

Only if you are on the Church Road and The Street stretch east of the village, or on the Polecat Road side of it. Tye Green and Hawbush Green are separate places with their own position, and the boundary is not obvious from the road.

Is there an Article 4 direction here?

The 2009 appraisal recommended the council consider one. Nothing is recorded on the national data, which is not the same as confirmation, so we ask the council to check it against your address as a first step.

Does living near Cressing Temple affect my house?

Not by itself. The barns and their setting are protected in their own right, and the wider archaeological sensitivity of the parish can bring a condition about recording during groundworks. Neither prevents a normal extension.

Can I just gravel the front for extra parking?

Gravel is fine, and it is the permeable answer the rules are asking for. Laying more than five square metres of impermeable hard surface at the front needs permission, and in the conservation area the appearance of the frontage is assessed as well.

Getting a price for a Cressing extension

We are based at West Bergholt and work across this district often enough to use Braintree’s forms and Braintree’s policies rather than assuming north Essex shares one planning system.

Our team surveys the property properly: the ground, the trees and their species, the foul and surface water arrangements and where they actually run, the access for a wagon, and the designation position on your specific plot. 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 we work with to calculate it, we handle the application with Braintree District Council, 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.