Extensions in Myland

Extending in Myland

Colchester’s newest housing, and the part of the city where the thing that stops you is most likely to be in your own paperwork rather than on a council map.

Myland is the northern edge of Colchester, running from Braiswick across to Mile End and out to the A12, with the London to Norwich main line as its southern boundary. The 2021 census counted 18,094 people in the parish. A very large share of them live in housing built since 1990.

That one fact sets the shape of the work here. There is almost no Victorian stock on the estates, very little in the way of shallow interwar footings, and no conservation area over them. What there is instead is documentation: conditions attached to the original estate permission, covenants in the transfer, a management company with a say in what the front of your house looks like. In the older parts of Colchester the thing that stops an extension is usually a designation. In Myland it is usually a piece of paper you already own and have not read since completion.

One parish, two names

Myland and Mile End are the same civil parish, and the difference between them is the age of what you are standing in front of.

The parish was recorded as Mile End St Michael as far back as 1254, and the two names have run alongside each other ever since. The modern civil parish of Myland was created in 1999, and it is the only part of the pre-1974 borough of Colchester to have one.

Local usage has quietly divided the names. Myland has attached itself to the newer development, the estates north of the railway and the roads off Mill Road and Boxted Road. Mile End has stayed with the old road corridor and the buildings along it. Same council, same neighbourhood plan, but the houses are eighty to a hundred and fifty years apart and so is the job. If yours is on or just off Mile End Road itself, the Mile End page is the more useful of the two.

Who decides, and what they decide against

Colchester City Council, with a made neighbourhood plan sitting alongside the local plan.

Applications here go to Colchester City Council. That is worth stating plainly, because it is not true of everywhere with a Colchester postal address, and it is the sort of thing a builder discovers late.

Myland also has something most of Colchester’s suburbs do not. The Myland and Braiswick Neighbourhood Plan was reviewed and made in October 2023 and runs to 2033. A made neighbourhood plan is not a consultation document or a wish list. It forms part of the statutory development plan, which means an application in this parish is determined against its policies as well as against the local plan. For householder work that rarely changes the answer, but it does change what an officer will comment on, particularly around design, boundary treatment and the character of a street that was laid out as a single scheme.

The housing stock, decade by decade

Four waves of building, and each one leaves a different problem in the loft.

The oldest of the modern stock is late twentieth century estate housing, mostly detached and semi detached, with cavity walls, concrete interlocking tiles and a garage either integral or attached. Then came the 1990s and 2000s infill. Then the two big ones.

Severalls Hospital closed in 1997 after eighty-odd years, and its 300 acres between Boxted Road, Mill Road and Severalls Lane have been turned over to housing across the past two decades, running to well over a thousand homes. Around the same time the Cants rose nursery ground came forward for building. More recently Chesterwell and Kingswood Heath have added several hundred more, and the Mill Road playing fields site is set to follow.

What all of that has in common is roof structure. Houses built from the mid 1960s onwards were almost universally roofed with trussed rafters, the prefabricated W shaped frames that fill a loft with timber and cannot be cut. Every member in a truss is carrying something, so a truss with a piece taken out of it is no longer a truss. Converting that roof means largely replacing it: new steels or purlins to carry the roof, new joists to carry the floor, and a working sequence that holds the roof up while the trusses come out. It is a real cost, it is entirely foreseeable, and a quote that has not allowed for it is not a quote for the job.

The newest phases add a second constraint. Plots are tighter, gardens are shorter, and roof pitches are shallow enough that some lofts simply do not contain a room, which is the verdict the roofs at Highwoods usually return as well.

The rights you may not actually have

This is the Myland conversation, and it is the one that catches people who have read the permitted development rules and found nothing wrong with their plan.

Permitted development is a national grant of planning permission, and it can be taken away in several ways that have nothing to do with conservation areas.

The first is a condition on the original planning permission for the estate. Large residential schemes are frequently granted subject to a condition removing some or all householder permitted development rights, so that the council keeps control of how a new street evolves. Where that condition exists, an extension that would be permitted development anywhere else needs a full application here. The condition sits on the estate permission, not on your deeds, and most people have never seen it.

The second is the parking condition. Where a garage was counted towards the parking provision for the scheme, a condition may require it to be retained and available for a car. That does not automatically stop you converting the garage, but it means the conversion becomes an application rather than a weekend decision.

The third is not planning at all. Restrictive covenants in the transfer are a private contract between landowners. The council does not enforce them, does not consider them, and a planning permission does not override one. Newer estates often add a management company with the right to approve alterations. Being granted permission and then finding a covenant that forbids the thing you have permission for is a genuinely unpleasant position to be in, and it is entirely avoidable by reading the deeds first.

The fourth is arithmetic. Permitted development allows extensions and outbuildings covering no more than half the land around the original house, and on a modern plot with a short garden that ceiling arrives sooner than anyone expects. “Original” means as the house was first built, not as you bought it, so a previous owner’s conservatory has already spent some of your allowance. Our guides to planning conditions and to what the original house means go through both in detail.

Flats, and the rule that surprises people

Some of the newest homes in Myland are not houses in planning terms at all.

Parts of the Severalls redevelopment involved converting existing buildings, including the Grade II listed administration block, and elsewhere in the parish there are apartment buildings among the houses. Permitted development rights under Class A apply to a dwellinghouse. A flat is not a dwellinghouse for that purpose, and a building containing flats is excluded, so a ground floor flat with its own garden has no permitted development right to extend into it. Everything is an application.

Where a listed building is involved, listed building consent is a separate consent from planning permission and is needed for works affecting the building’s character, inside as well as out. Listing does not by itself remove permitted development rights, which is a common misunderstanding, but it adds a control that operates alongside them.

What the trench actually finds

North Colchester is not the shrinkable clay everybody quotes for, and the made ground is the local variable.

The plateau north of the city, the same drift that runs on out to Boxted, carries glacial deposits of sand and gravel over London Clay, and which of those your foundation lands in changes both the depth and the design. Granular ground can be good bearing at a sensible depth, and it drains, so a soakaway will often work here where the same detail on Lexden clay would not. It also collapses into an open trench and runs when it is wet, which is a different problem on the day.

The bigger variable is what people have already done to the ground. A hospital site that operated for eight decades, and horticultural land before that, leaves buried footings, old service runs, filled trenches and imported material. Made ground is not a defect, it is an unknown, and an unknown under a foundation is priced either by investigating it or by guessing. Trial holes cost very little next to finding a brick culvert with a digger bucket.

Where the strata change across a single footprint the risk is differential settlement: one end of the extension on gravel and the other on clay, moving at different rates and cracking the join. The structural engineer we work with designs for that once it is known, and nobody can design for it while it is still a guess.

Drainage on an estate

Modern estates have designed drainage, which is helpful right up until you want to build over it.

Foul and surface water on a modern estate were laid out to a plan, and copies of that plan exist. That is a real advantage over an older suburb. The catch is that shared runs and adopted sewers cross gardens, and building over or within three metres of a public sewer needs a build over agreement from Anglian Water. That is a separate application on its own timescale and it can require a survey of the pipe, a foundation designed to bridge rather than load it, or a diversion.

Surface water is the other half. Newer phases drain to attenuation systems sized for the roofs and hard surfaces that were approved, not for the ones added since. A new extension roof and a new patio produce run off that has to go somewhere designed rather than somewhere convenient. There is more in our guide to build over agreements and drainage.

What people build in Myland

Modern houses have a different set of weak points from old ones, and the work follows them.

The single storey rear extension leads, because the standard estate layout puts a kitchen at the back that was sized for a smaller way of living. Opening it into the dining room and taking the back wall out is the job most people are here for, and on these plots the constraint is usually the fifty per cent rule rather than the depth limit.

Garage conversions come next. An integral garage on a 1990s house has a roof, a floor and three walls already, which makes it the cheapest room in the house to create, subject to the parking condition above. Building Control treats it as a material change of use, so the floor needs damp proofing and insulating, the walls need lining and insulating, and the opening left by the door needs closing properly under the existing lintel rather than filled in and rendered over.

Rooms over a garage are third, where the garage was built with foundations that will take a storey or where they can be strengthened. Loft conversions are fourth, and on this stock they are the one that most often comes back as no.

Questions we get asked in Myland

My neighbour extended without applying. Can I?

Possibly, and possibly not. Estates are built in phases under different permissions with different conditions, and two houses that look identical can sit under different rules. The condition is checked against your address rather than against the street.

Is my house in a conservation area?

The modern estates are not, and no conservation area is recorded over them. That gives you permitted development rights the older parts of the city do not have, which is precisely why the conditions and covenants matter so much here.

Can I convert the loft?

It depends on the roof rather than on the rules. Measure from the top of the ceiling joists to the underside of the ridge before anything else. If the height is there, the trusses can be replaced with a structure that leaves a room. If it is not, raising the ridge is a planning application and a design question about how the house then sits in its street.

Does the management company have to agree?

If the transfer says so, yes, and that is separate from planning permission. It is worth establishing early, because it runs on nobody’s timetable but its own.

Getting a price for a Myland extension

We are at West Bergholt, a short run round the north of the city, so this is local work rather than a postcode on a coverage map.

Our team comes out and looks at the ground, the garage, the roof structure, the garden depth and the drain runs, and we check the planning history of your address before anyone draws anything. 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 so you are not the one standing between five trades who each blame the others.

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