Extensions in Old Heath

Extending in Old Heath

Colchester’s first landing place, and a suburb where the width of the passage down the side of the house sets the price before anything else does.

Old Heath runs south east from the town along Old Heath Road, downhill to the working river at the Hythe. The name is a worn-down version of Old Hythe: this was the town’s original port, and it kept the name after the trade moved half a mile downstream to what is still called the Hythe today. The ward is Old Heath and The Hythe, and it covers both.

Colchester City Council is the planning authority for all of it, and Colchester City Council Building Control is who we notify. This is unparished Colchester, so there is no parish council in the consultation chain, unlike Rowhedge and Wivenhoe a short way further down the same river.

Three kinds of house on one road

Cottages at the top, terraces at the bottom, and a council estate between the wars in the middle.

The oldest stock is scattered along Old Heath Road and the lanes off it: small cottages and short brick terraces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built when this was a village outside the town. Frontages sit close to the road, ceilings are low, walls are often solid rather than cavity, and the roof structure was cut on site rather than designed.

Downhill towards the Hythe the grain changes to Victorian and Edwardian terraces built for the men who worked the quays, the engineering works and the mills. These are the narrow ones. Two rooms wide at most, frequently with a rear closet wing that leaves an L-shaped void alongside it, and with no side access at all in a lot of cases.

Between those two, Old Heath carries one of the four estates the town council built between the wars. Between 1921 and 1938 Colchester put up 1,029 council houses to central government space standards, on land at Mile End, at Lexden, between the Harwich and Ipswich roads, and here. Those interwar semis are the easiest houses to extend in the whole area: decent garden depth, a side gate, hipped roofs with proper purlins, and shallow strip footings that are at least predictable.

Knowing which of the three you own is not a nicety. It changes the extension type, the foundation, the access cost and whether a loft is worth having.

The side return, and why it dominates here

On a narrow plot the useful space is beside the house, not at the end of the garden.

A Victorian or Edwardian terrace with a rear wing has a strip of ground running alongside that wing, typically between 1.5 and 2.5 metres wide, that does nothing except grow moss and hold a bin. Filling it turns a dark galley kitchen into a room the width of the house, and it does it without eating garden.

The engineering is the interesting part. The new roof has to tie into the flank wall of the wing and the boundary wall on the far side, which usually means a steel beam on padstones at the wing, and it means the whole opening between the old kitchen and the new space needs a beam sized by an engineer rather than guessed. Because the strip is narrow and enclosed, daylight has to come from above, so a run of rooflights or a glazed roof section is doing most of the work. Our page on side return extensions goes through the detailing.

The boundary is where these jobs get slow. On a terrace the side return wall is very often the neighbour’s, or shared, and building off it or up to it engages the Party Wall etc. Act 1996. That is normal and it is not a dispute, but the notice periods are fixed in law and they run from service, so it is a first move rather than a last one.

Distillery Pond and the conservation position

There is a designated area here, it is small, and it is nowhere near most of Old Heath.

Off Distillery Lane, near the top of Old Heath Road, sits Distillery Pond, a spring-fed pond dug to serve the gin distillery Bawtree and Savill set up in 1812, which grew into one of the largest in the country. A conservation area is recorded over that pocket, and there are listed buildings around it.

If your house is inside it, the designation makes the property article 2(3) land: no side extension under permitted development, no two storey rear extension under it, no cladding under it, and no rear dormer under it, because the roof enlargement class is excluded on that land. A rooflight fitted within the plane of the existing slope belongs to a separate class with no such exclusion, so it stays permitted development on any slope unless a direction has been made removing it. The rest is a planning application judged on materials, roof form and how the work reads from the public side. Our guide to conservation areas and extensions sets out what actually changes.

Most of Old Heath is outside it. The point is that the boundary is drawn tightly and it is not guessable from a street name, so it is checked against your address before anything is drawn.

Getting materials in

This is the item that separates two honest quotes for the same drawing.

On the interwar semis there is a side gate, a driveway that will take a skip, and a route for a barrow. On the terraces near the Hythe there is frequently none of that. Material goes in through the front door and along a hall floor that has to be boarded, spoil comes out the same way, and a skip needs a permit from Essex County Council to stand on the highway. Where the street is too tightly parked to hold one, the job runs on bagged waste with a booked grab lorry, and concrete arrives by pump rather than by barrow.

Hythe Hill adds a gradient to all of that. A long dig on a sloping site means the spoil has further to travel and the levels need setting out carefully rather than off the existing floor. None of it is difficult. All of it is time, and time is the honest reason a terrace costs more per square metre than a semi on one of the open-fronted estates at Berechurch.

Water, at the bottom of the hill

The Colne is tidal here, and the low ground by the quays behaves accordingly.

The Hythe still has working quaysides at King Edward Quay and Haven Quay, and the river beside them rises and falls with the tide. Haven Road has a long record of tidal water coming up through the drainage in combination with heavy rain, and there is an ongoing programme of valve, sensor and pond capacity work aimed at it.

Further downstream at Wivenhoe, the Colne Barrier closes against storm surges to protect low lying land at Colchester. It does not change the flood map. The Environment Agency’s Flood Map for Planning deliberately shows the zones as they would be with no defences present, because its job is to map the source of the risk rather than the current standard of protection, so the low ground here reads as tidal flood zone whether or not the barrier is working, and it will show on a search.

For a householder extension the consequences are contained rather than fatal. National planning guidance treats a householder extension as minor development, so the sequential test is not applied to it, and councils generally work to standing advice rather than consulting the Agency on each one. What changes is the construction: a deliberate finished floor level, a solid floor rather than suspended timber, materials low down that will dry rather than rot, and sockets dropped from above instead of run at skirting height. Our guide to flood zones and extensions in Essex covers it in full.

Higher up Old Heath Road you are well clear of any of that. The ward contains both situations, which is exactly why the flood position is checked by address and not by name.

What is under the garden

Sand and gravel over clay on the higher ground, and something less predictable near the water.

Ground investigation along Old Heath Road has found sand and gravel sitting over clay, which is a more forgiving combination than clay alone: granular material does not shrink and swell with the seasons, so a foundation on it is less hostage to a dry summer and a nearby tree. It is not a free pass. The gravel is patchy, it can run when a trench is left open, and the clay below it is still London Clay with all the behaviour that implies. Gravel like this was dug commercially at Shrub End, where made ground dominates. On a clear plot 900mm to 1.2m is normal, and near a mature tree it goes deeper by an amount that depends on the species, its mature height and its distance from the wall.

Nearer the Hythe you are into alluvium and made ground. This has been an industrial waterfront for centuries, with mills, a distillery, quays and engineering works, and ground that has been filled, levelled and refilled settles under load in a way undisturbed ground does not. The sensible answer there is usually to found through it rather than on it, and the way you find out is a trial hole rather than an assumption. The foundations guide explains what each type is actually solving.

Drains, which are old and rarely where the plan says

Terraces share runs, and a shared run is a public sewer.

On a terrace or a semi detached pair a single drain frequently serves several houses. Under the current rules a run serving more than one property is a public sewer for these purposes even where it lies entirely inside your own garden, and building over it or within three metres of it needs a build over agreement from Anglian Water.

That is a separate application on its own timescale, and it can require a survey, a foundation designed to bridge the run rather than load it, or a diversion. On the side return jobs here it comes up constantly, because the strip you want to build on is exactly where the original soil pipe and gully were put. We lift the covers and follow the falls at survey stage. Twenty minutes then is the cheapest twenty minutes on the job, and the detail is in build over agreements and drainage.

What people build in Old Heath

Infill first, rear second, and lofts where the roof was cut rather than bought.

The side return infill, on its own or wrapped round into a modest rear extension, is the commonest brief on the terraced stock. It buys the width the house never had.

On the interwar semis it is the single storey rear extension, opening the back into a kitchen and dining space, and the loft conversion. Those roofs are cut timber with purlins, so the loft is genuinely convertible, and where the roof is hipped, squaring it into a gable is what makes the floor usable. The narrower Victorian roofs are a harder proposition: shorter spans, lower ridges and a rear wing that complicates the layout.

Questions we get asked in Old Heath

There is no way round the side. Does that stop me?

No, it changes the method and the price. Everything goes through the house, the floors get protected, concrete comes by pump and waste goes out in bags rather than a skip. It is worth having priced honestly rather than discovered in week two.

Am I in a conservation area?

Probably not, unless you are in the pocket around Distillery Pond. It is checked on the address, because designation decides whether a side extension or a dormer is a certificate or a full application.

My house is at the bottom of the hill. Will the flood zone stop the work?

Not for a householder extension. It shapes the floor level and the construction detail, and it stays on the search regardless, because the map ignores the barrier by design.

Is the house solid wall or cavity?

On the older cottages and many of the terraces, solid. That changes how the new work is tied in, how the damp proof course is dealt with and what the insulation strategy has to be, and it is one of the first things looked at.

Getting a price for an Old Heath extension

We work out of West Bergholt, which is twenty minutes across town rather than a coverage-map postcode.

Our team surveys the property properly: the access route and what will fit down it, the wall construction, the roof structure, the drain runs and covers, the ground, the levels and the designation position. 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.