Westminster's 2005 audit of the Smith Square Conservation Area, first designated in 1969 within the Government Precinct and redesignated in its own right in 1987, describes an exceptionally well preserved enclave of early eighteenth century terraced town houses. The audit records that Barton Booth, a successful actor with a country residence at Cowley, built up part of Great College Street in 1722 and named it Barton Street and Cowley Street.
The audit describes Lord North Street, with its crisp building edge and consistent building height to street width ratio, as the centre of that eighteenth century development, and identifies Barton Street, Cowley Street and Little College Street as intimate routes. The houses are mostly three storey brown brick terraces with mansards and basements, dating from about 1722 to 1726, and they are listed at Grade II*.
North of St James's Park, the Birdcage Walk audit explains that Queen Anne's Gate is made up of the former Park Street and Queen's Square, and that Park Street was rebuilt in the 1770s, partly by Christ's Hospital and partly by another builder on a building lease.
For a homeowner, this means a project is planned around the listing from the start. The Smith Square audit sees almost no room for roof alterations or extensions, and it notes that many buildings keep original cast iron or lead rainwater goods.
Our first visit to a house in these streets records the plan of every floor, the joinery and the ironwork, so that a refurbishment brief can separate what needs listed building consent from what does not before any design starts.
The houses' details are part of what makes the streets coherent: the audit lists timber sashes under flat gauged brick arches, interesting door hoods and door cases, and some stucco at ground floor level. Repairs to any of them start from a record of what survives on the neighbouring houses, so that the street keeps the unity the audit describes.
We hold a pre-application conversation with Westminster's conservation officers on any scheme in these streets that changes a roof, a rear wall or a basement, so that the listed building consent and planning applications go in together and match. Where a house has later alterations of poor quality, the same conversation covers which of them can be reversed as part of the work. Old and new work is then recorded for the house file.
Not every house in these streets is brown brick: a group in Gayfere Street is in yellow stock brick, the Smith Square audit notes, and the Birdcage Walk Conservation Area around Queen Anne's Gate was designated in June 1969. Repairs match the brick and detail of the house in hand.
Towards Millbank the conservation area is a mixed commercial and residential enclave, so a Westminster house project often has offices as neighbours, and their working hours help decide when the noisiest stages are done.
Sources: Westminster City Council: Smith Square conservation area audit (SPG, adopted 14 January 2005); Westminster City Council: Birdcage Walk conservation area audit (SPD, adopted 16 June 2008).
