Extensions in Great Bromley

Extending in Great Bromley

Not a village so much as a parish: eleven hundred people spread over three thousand acres of farmland, three hamlets and a trunk road through the middle.

Great Bromley sits about six miles east of Colchester and four miles south of Manningtree. The 2021 census recorded 1,108 people in the parish, which covers around three thousand acres of mostly good arable land broken up by small woods. The population is distributed rather than concentrated: Balls Green, Hare Green and Bromley Cross are separate hamlets, and the A120 trunk road cuts straight through the parish between them. The parish church of St George, largely fourteenth and fifteenth century, is grand enough that it has been called the cathedral of the Tendring Hundred, and the parish also held one of the earliest Chain Home radar stations from the late 1930s.

Extending here is a rural job in the proper sense. The planning position is comparatively relaxed. The site logistics and the drainage are where the money and the problems are.

Tendring District Council

The postcode is CO7 and the post town is Colchester. The planning authority is neither.

Applications go to Tendring District Council, as they do across this whole eastern side of the boundary and in villages like Elmstead Market nearer the city. It is worth saying because two things point the wrong way: the address, and the fact that Colchester is where everybody shops.

No conservation area is designated over Great Bromley. Tendring has twenty of them, Ardleigh among them, and this parish does not hold one, so the article 2(3) restrictions that remove side extensions, two storey rear extensions, dormers and cladding from permitted development elsewhere do not apply here. What you get instead is a different kind of constraint: individual listed buildings scattered through the parish, and the fact that almost everything sits in open countryside where the officer’s question is about how a proposal reads in the landscape rather than against a designated character.

Listing works differently from designation and the two get conflated constantly. Where a building is listed, works to it need listed building consent, and that control reaches inside the building as well as outside. It does not by itself remove permitted development rights. A listed farmhouse in this parish can still hold rights that a modern house inside a conservation area has lost.

Drainage is the constraint nobody puts in the quote

Across a parish this dispersed, a good many houses treat their own sewage, and an extension can be the thing that exposes a system already at its limit.

Where a property is not on a mains foul sewer it will have a septic tank or a package treatment plant, and both of those are sized for the house as it stands. Adding bedrooms adds load. The Building Regulations cover this directly under Part H, which deals with wastewater treatment systems and cesspools, and Building Control will want to see that the arrangement still works for the enlarged house.

Two rules do most of the damage to budgets. The first is that a septic tank cannot lawfully discharge straight into a ditch or a watercourse. Under the general binding rules for small sewage discharges, any tank doing that had to be replaced or upgraded, generally to a package treatment plant, and that deadline passed on 1 January 2020. Plenty of properties are still running on an arrangement that predates the rule and nobody has looked at it.

The second is the drainage field. A septic tank discharging to ground needs a drainage field of adequate size, and the size comes out of a percolation test on the actual soil rather than off a chart. On heavy ground a compliant field is large. That leads directly to the practical problem, which is that the extension you want is often planned across exactly the piece of garden the drainage field is under. You cannot build over a drainage field, and the tank has to stay accessible for emptying.

Find the tank and the field before the drawings are done, not after. Relocating a treatment system is a five figure item and it is entirely predictable from a survey, which means there is no good reason for it to appear as a surprise halfway through.

The A120, and the lanes off it

Two different road authorities inside one parish, and only one of them is quick.

The A120 between Colchester and Harwich is a trunk road, which puts it in the hands of National Highways rather than the county council. Anything touching it, a new access or an altered one, is a slower and more formal conversation than the same question on a country lane, and National Highways gets consulted on applications that affect it. Where a property fronts the A120 there is also no realistic prospect of parking a lorry or standing a skip on the verge.

Everything else here is Essex County Council’s, and it is single track with passing places. That has a direct effect on the build. An articulated delivery cannot get down most of these lanes, so materials arrive on smaller vehicles and there are more deliveries. A ready mixed concrete wagon is nine metres long and thirty two tonnes loaded, and where it cannot reach the trench the concrete gets pumped or barrowed, which is a cost and a time item that belongs in the price rather than in a conversation on the day.

The compensation is that properties out here almost all have room on their own ground for a skip, a welfare unit and a materials compound. No permits, no neighbour parking dispute, and no double handling through a hallway. Against a village street job, that is a real saving.

The ground, and the trees on the boundary

A farmed plateau where the covering over the clay changes across a field, let alone across a parish.

North east Essex sits on London Clay with a covering of later sands, gravels and brickearth laid down over it, and the thickness of that covering varies considerably from one part of a parish to the next. Three thousand acres is a lot of ground for a single assumption. Where the covering is thin or absent you are founding in shrinkable clay with all that implies for depth and seasonal movement. Where it is thick you may be into granular material that behaves quite differently.

Nothing about that is guesswork if a hole gets dug. On a rural plot there is space to dig one properly and no permit needed to do it, so the excuse for not knowing is thinner here than anywhere.

The trees are the other half. A farmed parish means hedgerow oaks, shelter belts and field boundary planting, and where a garden was cut out of a field those trees are now sitting on a boundary a few metres from where you want to build. A mature tree on clay draws a substantial volume of water out of the ground across a growing season and its zone of influence reaches well past the canopy, which pushes a foundation deeper. Removing it is rarely the shortcut it looks like: ground dried for decades takes the water back and swells, and heave does more damage than settlement.

The hedge, and a rule that is narrower than people think

Countryside hedgerows carry legal protection. The one round your garden almost certainly does not.

The Hedgerows Regulations 1997 require six weeks’ notice to the council before an important hedgerow is removed, and they apply to hedgerows on or adjoining agricultural land, common land, a nature reserve and similar. That sounds alarming on a plot carved out of a farm, and then the scope narrows sharply: a hedgerow within the curtilage of a dwellinghouse, or marking the boundary of that curtilage, is excluded from the regulations altogether.

So the hedge round your garden is generally yours to deal with. The hedge that runs on beyond the garden gate along the edge of the field is a different matter, and that distinction is worth establishing before a digger takes a line through it. Nesting birds are protected regardless of any of this, which in practice means hedge and tree work gets done outside the nesting season.

What people build here

Detached houses and former farm buildings, and the brief is usually space and warmth in the same job.

The housing is predominantly detached, ranging from timber framed and rendered cottages through Victorian and Edwardian farmhouses to post-war and later detached properties on generous plots, plus a steady number of converted agricultural buildings. Plots are large, so a rear or side extension rarely runs out of room, and a two storey extension is a genuine option where it is on a detached house.

The commonest brief is a large kitchen and living space at the back with a utility and a boot room, which is what a house at the end of a muddy lane actually needs. Annexes come second, on plots that have the space and a relative who would rather be near than far. Our page on annexe extensions covers how the occupancy question gets handled.

Converted farm buildings need one check before anything else. Many rural conversions were permitted subject to a condition removing permitted development rights, and conversions carried out through the agricultural to residential prior approval route have those rights removed as a matter of law. The decision notice tells you which. Reading it is a ten minute job that occasionally saves an entire scheme, and where it is ambiguous our guide to planning conditions explains how to read what is there.

Older houses out here also bring a fabric question with them. Solid walls, timber frames and lime construction do not want the same treatment as a cavity wall, and an extension detailed to modern insulation standards has to meet the old building without trapping moisture in it. That is a design decision at the junction, made early. There is more in our guide to insulation and U values.

Questions we get asked in Great Bromley

Which council do I apply to?

Tendring District Council. The Colchester postal address is the thing that misleads people, and a submission to the wrong authority costs weeks rather than money.

Is there a conservation area here?

No conservation area is designated over this parish, so the permitted development restrictions that come with one do not apply. Individual buildings may still be listed, which is a separate control on the building itself.

Will my septic tank cope with another bedroom?

Possibly not, and it is worth establishing early. Building Control will look at the arrangement for the enlarged house, and older systems frequently turn out to be undersized, poorly sited or discharging in a way that has not been lawful for some years.

Can I extend a barn conversion?

Sometimes only with planning permission. Conversions done under the agricultural prior approval route have no permitted development rights, and conventionally converted barns often had them removed by condition.

Getting a price for a Great Bromley extension

We work out of West Bergholt on the far side of Colchester, which puts Great Bromley a straightforward run out along the A120.

Our team comes out and looks at the things that decide a rural price rather than a suburban one: how a lorry gets to the plot, where the tank and the drainage field are, what the ground gives up in a trial hole, what the boundary trees are doing, and on a converted building what the original permission actually said. 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 Tendring District 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.