Extensions in Mile End

Extending in Mile End

The road was here before the houses were, and that is why the plots are the shape they are.

Mile End Road runs north out of Colchester from the station towards Nayland, carrying on out through Great Horkesley, and the settlement grew along it rather than around anything. A church, a scatter of cottages, then a long line of building down both sides of a main road. Everything about extending here follows from that geometry: frontages are narrow, gardens are long, and the house next door is usually attached to yours.

It is the older half of a parish that also contains some of the newest housing in Colchester. If your address is on one of the estates north of the railway rather than on the corridor itself, the Myland page covers a different set of problems, mostly to do with conditions and covenants. Down here the problems are physical.

How the corridor got built

Two bursts of development, sixty years apart, and you can date a house from the pavement.

The oldest of it sits around St Michael’s church and the lanes off the main road: cottages and villas from the nineteenth century and earlier, in ones and twos rather than in terraces of thirty.

The rest arrived after the land came onto the market. The Lucas estates at Mile End were sold in 1917, and glebe land followed in 1918 and 1920. Between 1921 and 1938 Colchester saw a great deal of private building in small estates, ribbon development and infilling, and this road took a full share of it. That is why so much of Mile End is interwar: bay fronted semi detached pairs, short runs of terrace, the occasional detached house on a wider plot, all fronting a road that was already there.

Post-war infill filled the gaps behind. The result is a corridor where three quite different construction eras sit within a hundred metres of each other, and where the answer to any question about your extension starts with which of them you own.

Who decides

Colchester City Council, and a made neighbourhood plan that covers this end of the parish as well as the new one.

Applications go to Colchester City Council. Mile End sits within the civil parish of Myland, recorded as Mile End St Michael as long ago as 1254, and the Myland and Braiswick Neighbourhood Plan made in October 2023 applies here too. Its policies form part of the statutory development plan, so they are among the things an application is decided against.

No conservation area is designated over the Mile End Road corridor. That matters in a specific way rather than a general one: a rear dormer, a side extension and cladding all stay within permitted development here, where in Lexden or Dedham they would not. It is not a licence to do anything. It does mean the route to a loft conversion on an interwar semi is usually a certificate rather than an application.

Solid walls, and what they change

Anything built here before roughly 1920 has no cavity, and every junction detail follows from that.

A Victorian house on this road is typically a single leaf of brickwork nine inches thick, laid in lime mortar, with a slate roof and often a rear closet wing. Interwar houses next door have a cavity. The two are extended in different ways and it is not a matter of taste.

On a cavity wall, a new extension roof is weathered into the existing wall with a cavity tray that catches water inside the wall and throws it back out through weep holes. A solid wall has no cavity for the tray to sit in, so the abutment is detailed differently, and a builder who fits the cavity wall detail to a solid wall has built a damp patch into your new room.

Lime mortar is the second half of it. Soft old bricks bedded in lime move slightly and let moisture out through the joint. Repointing them in a hard cement mortar traps that moisture in the brick, which then spalls at the face over a few winters. New work tied into old is pointed to suit the old, not the other way round. Getting the brick itself to match is its own conversation, covered in our guide to matching brickwork.

Structural openings differ too. Taking out the back wall of a solid walled house means needles and props through the wall rather than propping off a cavity leaf, and the beam bears on padstones sized for masonry that was never designed to concentrate a load. On an interwar house of the same width the calculation is routine. On the Victorian one next door it is not the same calculation.

Roofs you can work in

The one advantage this stock has over the estates half a mile north.

Houses built before the mid 1960s were roofed the old way: rafters bearing on purlins, with the loft largely open. The timber can be worked with, strengthened and built around. Houses built after that were almost universally trussed, and a truss cannot be cut, so converting one of those roofs means replacing most of it.

So a loft conversion on a Mile End Road semi is usually a question of head height and stairs rather than of demolishing the roof structure. Measure from the top of the ceiling joists to the underside of the ridge first. Approved Document K wants two metres of headroom over a staircase and allows a loft relaxation to 1.9 metres at the centre of the stair reducing to 1.8 at the side, and that relaxation is often what decides whether the conversion happens at all.

The side return and the rear infill

Narrow plots with a rear wing produce one shape of extension more than any other.

Where a house has a rear wing, there is a strip of ground beside it, usually between one and a half and two and a half metres wide, that does almost nothing. Roofing that strip and taking the wall out turns a dark galley kitchen into a room the full width of the house. It adds less floor area than a big rear extension and it changes the house far more, which is why it is the commonest brief on the older stock here.

The constraint is the boundary. Under permitted development, an extension within two metres of a boundary is limited to three metres at the eaves, which on a side return usually means a flat or very shallow roof and glazing in the roof rather than a pitch. The width is fixed by the plot, so all the design effort goes into daylight. Our page on side return extensions goes through how that gets resolved.

Rear infill is the same idea applied to an L shaped plan, squaring off the back of the house. On the interwar semis it is often combined with a modest rear extension to produce a single wide room, and that combination is where the party wall questions start.

Getting materials in

On a terrace with no side gate, everything comes through the front door, and that is a cost rather than an inconvenience.

The interwar semis mostly have a side path. The Victorian terraces and cottages frequently do not. Barrowing spoil out through a hallway and carrying blocks in the same way is slower than tipping into a skip on a driveway, and slower is what you are paying for.

The road is the other half. Mile End Road is a busy route into the city and it carries hospital traffic at Turner Road, so a skip on the carriageway needs a permit from the highway authority and cannot simply appear. Deliveries get timed rather than booked for whenever the merchant is passing. Where there is no off street parking, the working assumption is that the trade vehicles are parked further away and the walk is part of the day.

None of this is unusual and none of it is a reason not to build. It is a reason to have it priced honestly at the start rather than raised as an extra in week three.

Party walls, and footings that are not where you would put them

Attached houses plus shallow old foundations means the Act applies here more often than most people expect.

Most houses on this corridor are terraced or semi detached, so cutting into a shared wall, building up to the boundary line, or excavating within three metres of next door’s structure to a depth below their foundations all require formal notice under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996.

That last trigger is the one that catches Mile End. A Victorian cottage may be sitting on a couple of courses of brick footing a few hundred millimetres down. A new extension founded to a modern depth alongside it is inevitably deeper, so the excavation notice applies even where nobody is touching the wall itself. Notice periods are one or two months depending on the section, they run from service rather than from agreement, and the only way to shorten them is an adjoining owner who consents in writing. Our guide to the Party Wall Act sets out which section does what.

The related point is that the old footing tells you nothing reliable about what is under the rest of the house. Foundations on this stock vary within a single terrace, and they are established by digging a hole rather than by assuming from the age.

Drainage older than the drawings

Shared runs in back gardens, laid before anyone recorded them properly.

Terraces and semi detached pairs on this corridor commonly share a drain, with a run collecting several houses and crossing gardens on its way out. Since October 2011 most of those shared lateral drains and private sewers have been in the ownership of the water company, which means a pipe entirely inside your garden can still be a public sewer.

Building over or within three metres of one requires a build over agreement from Anglian Water, on its own timescale, and it can call for a survey of the pipe, a foundation designed to bridge it, or a diversion. Manhole covers in the middle of a back garden are the usual clue. Lifting them and following the falls takes twenty minutes at survey stage and it is the cheapest twenty minutes on the job.

Questions we get asked in Mile End

Can I have a side return if my house is terraced?

Usually yes, and it is often the best value work on this stock. The width comes from the plot, the eaves height comes from the boundary rule, and the daylight comes from the roof.

Do I need planning permission for a rear dormer?

Not automatically. There is no conservation area over this corridor, so the volume allowance under permitted development is available in principle, subject to the dormer being set back from the eaves, not sitting above the ridge and not facing the road. It is confirmed against your address rather than assumed.

My house has no side access. Is it worth it?

Yes, but it changes the programme and the price. What it should not do is arrive as a surprise halfway through, and it will not if it was priced at survey.

Will the new brick match?

Closely, rarely exactly. A hundred year old face has weathered and the mortar has aged with it. Choosing the brick and the mortar together, and picking where the join falls, does more for the result than the brick alone.

Getting a price for a Mile End extension

West Bergholt is a few minutes away across the Colne, so we know this road and we know what building on it involves.

Our team comes out and reads the house first: whether the wall is solid or cavity, where the footing sits, what the rear wing does to the plan, how much of the job has to come through the front door, and where the drains run. 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 or the certificate 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.