Extensions in Prettygate

Extending in Prettygate

The one big estate on this side of Colchester that was built for sale rather than for rent, and the roof is usually what decides what you can do with it.

Prettygate fills the ground between Lexden and Shrub End, west of the town, along Prettygate Road, Dugard Avenue, Baronswood Way and the cul-de-sacs off them. It went up as a single commercial venture. From the late 1950s a local firm, W. A. Hills and Son, built out around 260 acres of the Home Farm and Prettygate estates, and the work carried on through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

That origin is the whole difference between here and its neighbours. Monkwick and Shrub End were council building programmes. Old Heath has an interwar council estate at its centre. Prettygate was drawn by a developer for buyers, and everything that follows on this page comes from that one fact: the layout, the garages, the covenants in the title, and above all the way the roofs were built.

Colchester City Council is the planning authority, and Colchester City Council Building Control is the body we notify. Most of Prettygate is unparished Colchester, but the estate runs west into Stanway, which is a civil parish with its own council. Stanway Parish Council is consulted on applications inside the parish boundary. It does not decide them, and the determining authority is the same either side of the line, but on the western streets there is an extra consultee and it is worth knowing which side of the boundary your house sits.

What a Prettygate house is made of

Semis and detached houses on generous plots, with the garage built in rather than parked in a block.

The stock is mostly two storey semi detached and detached houses, with bungalows in places and some later infill. Frontages are open, the houses sit back from the road, and the rear gardens are genuinely generous for the period: this was land bought in bulk and laid out to sell, and space at the back was part of the offer.

Two features separate these houses from the council-built estates a mile away. The first is the garage. Estate housing built for private buyers from the late 1950s onwards assumed a car and put the garage against the house or inside its footprint, which is why garage conversions and rooms built over the garage are far more available here than they are at Monkwick, where the parking was grouped in courts. The second is the roof, and it is worth its own section.

Walls are cavity brickwork on strip footings, generally deeper and more consistent than the interwar stock closer to town. Floors on the earlier phases are often suspended timber over a void, and on the later ones solid concrete.

Trussed rafters, and why they change the price of a loft

This is the single most useful thing to know about a house of this age, and it is a two minute check in the loft hatch.

Until about 1960 a domestic roof was cut on site: rafters, purlins, a ridge and a few struts, leaving a broadly open void you could stand in. From the early 1960s the industry moved to the trussed rafter, a factory-made triangular frame with diagonal timbers across it, delivered on a lorry and craned into place. It is lighter, cheaper and quicker, and by the 1970s it was standard on speculative housing.

Prettygate straddles the changeover. The earliest phases have cut roofs. The later ones have trusses. In the loft the difference is obvious once you know: a cut roof gives you a clear space with a purlin running along each slope, while a trussed roof gives you a forest of W-shaped webs with no usable room between them.

Those webs are structural. They are not obstructions to be sawn out, they are what stops the roof spreading, and cutting one without a replacement structure is how a roof ends up sagging at the ridge and pushing the walls out at the eaves. Converting a trussed rafter roof is entirely possible and it is a different job: the engineer designs a new structure, usually steel beams spanning between the flank walls to carry a new floor and to pick up the rafters, and only then can the webs come out. That is more steel, more crane or more manhandling, more structural design and more disruption than a cut roof conversion. Our loft conversions page explains what each roof type gives you.

The practical consequence is that two identical-looking Prettygate semis on the same road can carry loft conversion prices that differ by a substantial margin, and the reason is above the hatch rather than in anyone’s pricing.

The garage, and building above it

The attached garage is Prettygate’s best asset and its most commonly mispriced one.

Converting an attached garage into a room is good value, because the walls, roof and slab are already there. The work that matters is invisible: the floor has to come up to the level and insulation standard Building Regulations require, the opening is closed with an insulated wall and a window built off a proper foundation, and the envelope has to reach current thermal performance.

Building a bedroom over the garage is the more ambitious version and the one that needs checking first. A garage was built to carry a garage roof. Its walls are often single skin rather than cavity, and its foundation was designed for a very light load. Adding a storey on top means proving the existing footing can take it, which frequently it cannot, and the answer is then to underpin or to build a new foundation alongside and transfer the load. That is not a disaster, it is a known piece of work, but it has to be established by digging an inspection pit before anyone prices the job. The detail is on our over garage extensions page.

Covenants, conditions and the title

On a developer-built estate the restriction that stops you is as likely to be in the deeds as in the planning system.

Estates sold plot by plot commonly carried restrictive covenants imposed by the builder: no alterations without consent, no structure forward of the building line, sometimes nothing but a private dwelling. Those covenants sit in the title and they run with the land, so they still bind an owner sixty years later.

A planning permission does not override a covenant. They are separate systems, one public and one private, and a permission granted by the council is no defence to a neighbour with the benefit of a covenant. Most of the time this is dormant and nobody enforces anything, but it is worth reading the title before the drawings, because the remedy if it goes wrong is expensive.

The planning side has its own version. Later infill within the estate can carry conditions on the original permission removing permitted development rights, and such a condition binds the house rather than the first buyer. No Article 4 direction is recorded over Prettygate, so where rights are missing here it is almost always a condition on a decision notice that has removed them, and that notice is findable before anything is drawn.

The trees are all the same age

An estate planted in one decade reaches maturity in one decade, and the ground has just noticed.

The ground under Prettygate is London Clay with granular material over it in patches, which is the normal story for this side of Colchester: clay shrinks in a dry summer, swells in a wet winter, and sets your foundation depth. On a clear plot 900mm to 1.2m is the usual outcome.

What is particular here is the timing. The gardens were planted out as the houses sold, so the trees went in across a narrow band of years, and the oaks, limes and conifers that were saplings when these houses were new are now at or near mature height, all at once. A tree’s influence on clay depends on its species, its mature height and its distance from the wall rather than on the spread of its branches, and a great many Prettygate plots have crossed the threshold in the last twenty years without anybody noticing. Foundations of two metres and more are not unusual where a large tree is close, and that decision is made from the species and the geometry, not from what the last extension down the road cost. Our guide to Essex clay subsoil and heave covers why felling the tree is the wrong way out of it.

Matching the brick

Estate housing of this period used a narrow palette of bricks, and most of them stopped being made decades ago.

A 1960s or 1970s estate house is usually built from a machine-made facing brick chosen for cost and consistency, laid in stretcher bond with a fairly strong mortar. Sixty years of weathering has changed the face colour, and the original product has generally been discontinued. A fresh modern brick set against it produces a join that reads as an addition from across the road.

The workable answers are a close match with a deliberate break at the junction, reclaimed stock of the right period, or a change of material so the new work reads as new rather than as a failed impersonation. Rendering the whole rear elevation is the fourth option and it is not always the cheap one. We go through this in matching brickwork on an extension.

Kidman’s Dyke and the western edge

The Iron Age earthworks reach this far, though here they mostly sit in open ground.

Prettygate sits within the outer part of the earthwork system that defined Camulodunum. Kidman’s Dyke is a scheduled monument in this ward, surviving along the western edge of Westlands Country Park.

Unlike Shrub End, where a scheduled length of Heath Farm Dyke runs through residential gardens, most of Prettygate’s archaeology sits in parkland and farmland rather than under the houses. Where an application does fall on ground with potential, the council attaches a condition, which usually means an archaeologist watching the foundation trench. That is a cost and a couple of days rather than a reason to change the design.

Access and the cul-de-sac

Good for the skip, occasionally awkward for the wagon.

Nearly every house here has a driveway, so the skip stands on your own ground without a highway permit, and there is a route round the side of most of the semis. That is straightforwardly cheaper to build than a terrace in town.

The layout gives a little of it back. These estates were drawn as loops and closes with turning heads sized for a car, and a lorry loaded with blocks or a concrete wagon has to get in and back out again past cars parked on both sides. It is a delivery planning problem rather than a design one, solved by booking smaller loads more often.

What people build in Prettygate

The back of the house first, then the roof, then the garage.

The single storey rear extension opening the kitchen into a dining and living space is the commonest brief by a distance, and these gardens take a deep one. Wrapping it round into the side return where the plot allows produces the L-shaped kitchen and family space most of these houses are asking for.

Loft conversions come next and split cleanly on the roof structure question. Garage conversions and rooms over the garage come third, and they are more available here than anywhere else nearby, purely because of how the estate was laid out.

Questions we get asked in Prettygate

How do I know if my roof is trussed?

Look through the hatch. Diagonal timbers crossing the space in a W pattern means trussed rafters. A clear space with a horizontal timber running along each slope means a cut roof. It changes the loft conversion price more than any other single factor on this estate.

Can I build a room over the garage?

Often, once the existing foundation has been checked by digging alongside it. Garage footings were designed for a garage, and the usual finding is that they need strengthening or replacing before a storey goes on top.

Am I in Stanway or Colchester?

Some of the western streets are in Stanway parish. It does not change who decides the application, which is Colchester City Council either way, but it adds the parish council as a consultee.

The neighbours extended without permission. Can I?

Their extension may well have been permitted development, or it may have been an application, or their house may sit under a different condition from yours. Rights are read off your own title and your own decision notices, not off the street.

Getting a price for a Prettygate extension

We are based at West Bergholt, a few minutes up the road from this side of Colchester.

Our team surveys the property properly: the roof structure through the hatch, the garage foundation where a storey is going over it, the existing footings, the trees and their distance from the wall, the drain runs, and the access for deliveries. 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 manage the planning route with Colchester City Council, we notify Building Control, and we run the job as main contractor so you are not project managing five parties.

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