Extensions in Fingringhoe

Extending in Fingringhoe

764 people and 321 households, which means there is no typical house here and no average price for building on one.

Fingringhoe stands on a low ridge between the Roman River and the Colne, four miles from Colchester by road. At the 2021 census the parish held 764 people in 321 households. It is a genuinely small place, and that fact drives everything below: there is no estate here where twenty houses share a floor plan, so nothing about a Fingringhoe job can be priced from a template.

The village runs around a green with a pond, the church and the pub, then thins out along the lanes towards Fingringhoe Wick and the marshes. Colchester City Council is the planning authority, which is not true of every village on this estuary, since across the water extensions in Alresford are decided by Tendring District Council.

The ground is the story here

Most people arrive expecting Essex clay. Within this parish you can be on clay, on sand and gravel, or on alluvium, and the difference is worth thousands.

Colchester sits on London Clay, and almost every conversation about foundations in this area starts from shrinkable clay, seasonal moisture movement and trees. That is the right starting point for a lot of Fingringhoe, and it is not the whole picture.

This stretch of the Colne holds substantial glacial sand and gravel, laid down by meltwater from the Anglian ice sheet. It was worked commercially: Fingringhoe Wick was a working gravel pit from 1924 to 1959 before it became the county’s first nature reserve. The Roman River valley floor, by contrast, is London Clay with alluvium over it.

So within one small parish there are three quite different foundation problems.

• On shrinkable clay, foundations start around 900mm to 1.2m on a clear plot and go deeper where a mature tree is within influencing distance. Soakaways work poorly because the clay does not take water away.
• On free draining sand and gravel, the seasonal shrink and swell that governs clay is not the issue, foundations can often be shallower, and a soakaway will actually do what a soakaway is supposed to do. Gravel brings its own question, which is the stability of the sides of an excavation.
• On alluvium in the valley bottom, the material is soft and variable, and the answer is usually to found through it to something competent rather than on it.

None of that can be read off a map with enough confidence to build on. It is established with trial holes at survey stage, and where the picture is unclear, with a site investigation. That is the single most useful thing anyone can do for a Fingringhoe budget, because a quote written on an assumed clay depth is either too expensive or dangerously cheap and there is no way to tell which. The mechanics are in our guide to extension foundations, and the clay side of it in Essex clay, subsoil and heave.

The conservation area is small

It covers the historic core around the church and the green, and it does not cover most of the parish.

The Fingringhoe conservation area was designated in 1980. It is compact, in the order of 250 metres by 190 metres, centred on the church, the pond and the green. St Andrew’s Church is Grade I listed, and the core holds a scatter of listed and locally valued buildings around it.

If you are inside that boundary, designation makes the property article 2(3) land and takes away specific permitted development rights: no side extension, no two storey rear extension, no cladding, and no rear dormer without planning permission. The larger single storey rear extension route that runs on prior approval is not available on this land either. No Article 4 direction is recorded over the village, so in practice the designation itself is the whole of the restriction, though it costs nothing to have the council confirm it against your address.

If you are outside it, and most of the parish is, none of that applies to you. Which is why the first thing we do is check the designation on the address rather than assume that a village with a conservation area is a village where everything is restricted. Our guide to conservation areas and extensions covers the application route where it does apply.

The nature reserve, and what it does not do

The wildlife designations here are real and they mostly do not touch a householder extension.

Fingringhoe Wick is part of the Colne Estuary, which carries a stack of designations: Site of Special Scientific Interest, National Nature Reserve, Special Protection Area and Ramsar site. The Roman River is an SSSI in its own right, running to around 275 hectares of woodland, grassland, fen and heath south of Colchester.

People assume this makes extending here difficult. Mostly it does not. Those designations bite on development in or adjacent to the sites themselves, not on a rear extension in the middle of the village.

The one that gets raised most often is the Essex Coast Recreational disturbance Avoidance and Mitigation Strategy, the tariff paid on new homes within the coastal zone of influence to fund mitigation. It applies to net new dwellings. Extensions to an existing house sit outside it. If someone has told you an extension in Fingringhoe attracts a coastal mitigation payment, that is not right.

Bats, birds and the calendar

This is the wildlife constraint that genuinely costs Fingringhoe homeowners time, and it costs it at the front of the job rather than the end.

Old roofs, older outbuildings and a rural setting add up to a reasonable likelihood of a bat roost. Bats and their roosts are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, and the protection covers the roost whether or not bats are in it at the time.

Where there is a reasonable likelihood of a roost, and a loft conversion, a re-roof or the demolition of an old outbuilding is exactly that situation, the council will expect a preliminary roost assessment with the application. If that assessment finds evidence, emergence and re-entry surveys follow, and those can only be done in the active season, broadly from May into the late summer. A survey you cannot do until May stops a job you wanted to start in February, and no amount of goodwill shortens it.

Nesting birds are the shorter version of the same problem. Active nests are protected while in use, so roof strip, soffit work and hedge removal get planned around the nesting season rather than into it.

The answer to both is the same and it is unglamorous: raise them at survey, not at the point of applying. Getting an ecologist out early costs a fraction of what a season’s delay costs.

Drainage where there is no main

A house on its own treatment system has a capacity, and an extension is a change to the load on it.

Plenty of property in a parish this size is not on mains drainage. If your house runs to a septic tank or a package treatment plant, adding bedrooms or a second bathroom is not just a building question, it is a question about whether the system is still adequately sized and whether the drainage field can take the additional discharge.

Two regimes apply. Building Regulations cover the design and installation of wastewater treatment. Separately, the general binding rules for small sewage discharges set out what may be discharged and where, and since the start of 2020 a septic tank discharging directly to a watercourse has had to be replaced or upgraded rather than left as it was. If your extension triggers a change to the system, that is the moment the existing arrangement gets looked at properly.

Where a property is heated by oil or bottled gas rather than mains gas, the same logic applies to heat. Another twenty five square metres of floor with modern insulation still adds load, and the existing boiler and radiator sizing needs checking rather than hoping.

Lanes, deliveries and turning a wagon round

The plots here are generous. Getting a lorry to them is the constraint.

Once you leave the Colchester road, the approach to Fingringhoe is single track lanes with passing places, no footway and farm traffic. A fully loaded articulated delivery is often not viable, so materials come in smaller loads on smaller vehicles, which means more deliveries and a higher delivery cost on the same quantity of brick.

Concrete is the one to plan for. A ready mix wagon needs somewhere to stand and somewhere to turn, and on a narrow lane with a soft verge that is a decision made in advance rather than on the morning. Where the wagon cannot reach the trench, it becomes a pump, and a pump is a booked and priced item rather than an afterthought.

Against that, the compensation is real: most houses here have space around them, side access is usually genuine rather than notional, and a skip stands on your own ground rather than on the highway with a permit.

What people build in Fingringhoe

Space is not the scarce thing here, so the briefs are different from the ones in town.

Side and rear extensions on detached houses are the most common work, and because the plots take them, they tend to be more generous than the equivalent job in Colchester. A wrap around that would fill a suburban plot fits comfortably on a lot of these gardens.

Garden rooms and home offices are the second, driven by distance from anywhere and by how well an outbuilding suits a plot with space in it. Conversion of a genuine outbuilding, a cart lodge or an old store, is a related job with a different structural starting point and, if the building is old, that bat conversation attached.

Annexes for a family member come up more here than in the suburbs, because there is room for one. The building is usually the easy part. The question that decides the application is whether what you are proposing remains part of the main house or becomes a separate dwelling in planning terms, which is a matter of self containment and use rather than of a connecting door. We have set that out in can someone live in a garden annexe.

Questions we get asked in Fingringhoe

Does the nature reserve stop me extending?

No. The estuary designations govern development in and next to those sites. What can affect you is protected species on your own building, particularly bats in the roof, and that is a survey question rather than a refusal.

Do I have to pay the coastal mitigation charge?

Not for an extension. That tariff applies to net new dwellings within the zone of influence, not to enlarging a house you already live in.

Everyone talks about Essex clay. Am I on it?

You might not be. There is worked and unworked sand and gravel along this stretch of the Colne as well as clay and, in the valley bottom, alluvium. It gets established with a trial hole, and on a village site that is twenty minutes well spent.

Am I in the conservation area?

Only if you are in the historic core around the green and the church, which is a small area. Most of the parish is outside it, and the permitted development position is entirely different on either side of that line.

Getting a price for a Fingringhoe extension

We are based at West Bergholt, the other side of Colchester, and we build across this side of the river regularly. Rowhedge and the lanes between the two are familiar ground, and you can read how the neighbouring village differs in extensions in Rowhedge.

Our team comes out and looks at the ground, the access for deliveries, the roof structure, the drainage arrangement and the conservation area position, and says what the job depends on before saying what it costs. 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 planning route 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.