Bushey · Hertsmere · Hertfordshire
Our London team takes on house projects in Bushey and Bushey Heath, survey through to finished build, run from our Finchley Road studio in Hampstead, NW3.
Hertsmere's design guide divides Bushey into three: the old village around St James' Church, Bushey Heath on the high ground towards Harrow, and North Bushey on the Watford side. Which of the three a house belongs to settles most of what follows, from conservation area to flood map. Rules that run across the whole borough sit on our Hertsmere page.
Serving Bushey from our Hampstead studio · NW3 6DN
020 7101 3168
Bushey projects
01 Whole house
Refurbishing a Bushey house, whether a timber-framed High Street front, a Victorian cottage on Park Road or a mid-century semi in North Bushey. Windows, roofs, render and services are planned around the age of the building and any conservation area.
02 More space
Rear and side extensions tested against Hertsmere's design guide and the permitted development limits for the address. Clay ground, nearby brooks and the gaps between houses are checked before design.
03 Kitchens
New kitchens in Bushey houses, including rooms opened into a dining room or carried into an extension. Extract, circuits and any structural opening are designed with the layout.
04 Roof space
Loft rooms under Bushey's gabled, hipped and slated roofs, lit by a dormer or rooflights if planning allows. We design the stair, new floor and fire escape route as one.
Bushey homes
At the 2021 Census Bushey's four wards counted 2,314 households in Bushey Heath, 3,119 in Bushey North, 2,946 in Bushey Park and 3,071 in Bushey St James. The mix shifts from ward to ward. In Bushey Heath 34.1% of households lived in detached houses and 34.6% in purpose-built flats; in Bushey North semi-detached houses made up 38.0%; in Bushey St James 22.8% were terraced.
The council's draft design guide, used for its planning decisions taken on or after 15 September 2016, names three distinct areas: Bushey Village, Bushey Heath and North Bushey. The village is the oldest part, marked out by St James' Church and the 17th and 18th-century buildings of the High Street, with Victorian terraced streets running off it. The Core Strategy adds that Bushey looks to Watford more than the borough's other settlements do.
The High Street appraisal reads the town as piecemeal growth from a small medieval village into a busy suburb. Its High Street properties stand on narrow plots and range from about 1500 to the twentieth century. Park Road, to the north, was built up after its land was bought in 1860, as groups of two to seven cottages, mostly threes and fours, each with a small enclosed front garden and a longer, narrow garden behind.
West of the centre, the council's local list calls the Arts & Crafts style the predominant character of houses in the west Bushey area, much of it from the late Victorian spread along Aldenham Road from the 1890s. The appraisal's management proposals credit the Bushey School of Art, founded by Sir Hubert von Herkomer in 1883, with shaping buildings of that period, when the style flourished mostly in private houses. The larger part of Bushey is suburban housing of the mid-20th century, including post-war council housing in Herne Road and Great Grove, and North Bushey is mainly mid-century houses and bungalows.
Our surveyor's first job in Bushey is to date the house and place it in one of these street patterns. The materials we expect to find behind the plaster, and the permissions we expect to need, both follow from that.
Sources: ONS Census 2021 TS044 accommodation type via Nomis (NM_2062_1), 2022 wards for bushey; Hertsmere Borough Council: Planning and Design Guide SPD; Hertsmere Borough Council: Draft Planning and Design Guide SPD Part D (draft for DM use and public consultation, October 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council: Local Plan Core Strategy DPD (adopted January 2013); Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): Bushey High Street Conservation Area Appraisal 2008, main report; Hertsmere Borough Council: List of Locally Listed Buildings, Appendix 5: Bushey and Bushey Heath (June 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): Bushey High Street Conservation Area Appraisal 2008, suggested boundary changes and management proposals
Approvals
Borough-wide policy, including which plans apply and the Green Belt test of Policy SADM26, is set out on our Hertsmere page. These are the checks that reach a Bushey address, in the order we run them.
Planning applications for Bushey addresses are decided by Hertsmere Borough Council, whose adopted Local Plan documents carry full weight in those decisions. Neither Bushey nor Bushey Heath has a parish or town council.
The adopted SADM plan lists four conservation areas in Bushey. Inside one, work that is normally permitted development may need an application, so we confirm the boundary for each address before anything else.
Some Bushey properties have lost permitted development rights under Article 4 directions, among them the Warren Estate roads in Bushey Heath and the Reveley Almshouses on Park Road. Where one applies, even modest outside changes go through an application.
The Environment Agency's warning area for the River Colne at Watford is described as including Bushey, and the borough's flood assessment records anecdotal flood problems in Bushey's part of the Colne floodplain. Work within 9m of any watercourse needs the borough's prior consent under its byelaws.
Building control for Bushey is Hertfordshire Building Control, with a private registered building control approver as the alternative. Planning permission and building regulations approval are separate, and plenty of projects need both.
Building right up to the line between two properties, cutting into the wall shared with next door, or digging deeper than the neighbour's footings close by all need notice to that neighbour. In a conservation area, anyone who wants to cut down, top or lop a tree has to give the council notice first.
Sources: Hertsmere Borough Council: Local Plan 2012-2027; Hertsmere Borough Council: Site Allocations and Development Management Policies Plan (adopted November 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council: Parish and Town Councils; Hertsmere Borough Council: Conservation areas in Hertsmere; Hertsmere Borough Council: Article 4 Directions - Conservation; Environment Agency flood-monitoring API: flood warning area 062FWF28Watford; Hertsmere Borough Council / AECOM: Level 1 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment (2023); Hertsmere Borough Council: Hertfordshire Building Control Limited; GOV.UK: Building regulations approval (printable guide); GOV.UK: Building regulations approval - when you need approval; GOV.UK: Party walls and building work (printable guide); GOV.UK: Party walls and building work - work you must tell your neighbour about
Local policy
Hertsmere has 15 conservation areas, and the SADM plan's table places four of them in Bushey, with their designation dates. The appraisals behind them describe what each one is protecting.
Designated on 22 January 1973 and last reviewed in 2009. Its appraisal counted 32 statutory listed buildings and 88 properties among the key unlisted buildings and groups, built in timber frame, red and yellow brick, stucco, slate and old tile, and it found sash windows, doors and shop fronts being lost.
Listed in the SADM plan as designated on 11 December 2009. The 2008 appraisal proposed it to bring together the buildings and landscapes associated with Sir Hubert von Herkomer and the Bushey School of Art, and describes Melbourne Road's semi-detached houses with front gardens, tall hedges and driveways.
First designated in March 1990, covering Windmill Lane, High Road and Hartsbourne Park. Its 2013 appraisal, issued as a draft, recommended de-designation in favour of local listing, tree orders and Article 4 directions on front boundaries; the council's list still includes the area, so we check its standing for any address there.
Designated on 23 October 1998. The Warren Estate inside it has its own supplementary planning guidance for deciding applications there, and two Article 4 directions cover Warren Road, The Comyns, The Lake, Coles Green and Rose Lawn. The design guide notes the Arts and Crafts housing in this area.
Article 4 directions take away some or all permitted development rights, and each one is different. Besides the two for the Warren Estate roads, Hertsmere lists directions for single Bushey properties: Sparrows Herne in Little Bushey Lane, The Moorings with addresses in The Avenue and Aldenham Road, Went House in Bushey Grove Road, and the Reveley Almshouses. For the almshouses the High Street appraisal spells out what the direction withdraws: extensions, changes to the roof form, porches, building within the curtilage, changes to gates, fences and boundary walls, and changes to the exterior paint.
The local list adds buildings with no statutory protection, and its Appendix 5 covers Bushey and Bushey Heath. Planning decisions have to take local listing into account, and it gives the council grounds to require extensions and outside alterations that suit the original building, although it leaves permitted development rights in place.
Hertsmere advises checking with its planners before any work, above all to a property's front, and offers pre-application advice on conservation. For a house inside one of these boundaries we read the appraisal and any direction for that street first, and design to them.
Sources: Hertsmere Borough Council: Conservation areas in Hertsmere; Hertsmere Borough Council: Site Allocations and Development Management Policies Plan (adopted November 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): Bushey High Street Conservation Area Appraisal 2008, main report; Hertsmere Borough Council: Bushey High Street and Melbourne Road Conservation Area Appraisal; Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): High Road Bushey Heath Conservation Area Appraisal, draft (April 2013); Hertsmere Borough Council: Bushey Heath High Road Conservation Area Appraisal; Hertsmere Borough Council: Frequently Asked Questions, Bushey Heath High Road Conservation Area Appraisal (2013); Hertsmere Borough Council: Article 4 Directions - Conservation; Hertsmere Borough Council: Draft Planning and Design Guide SPD Part D (draft for DM use and public consultation, October 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council: Locally listed buildings
Building fabric
The High Street appraisal links Bushey's materials to its ground: sand, gravels and clays under slowly permeable, seasonally waterlogged soils, which is why local buildings are of brick and tile. Each type of house below brings its own questions to the survey.
What lies behind a High Street front?
Around the village green many buildings are timber framed and refronted in red brick, or built of red and yellow brick that may be stuccoed, rendered, pebble dashed or painted, under old red tile or slate. Windows are recessed timber sashes, glazed with either six panes or two to each sash. We open up with care, because the frame decides where new openings and services can go.
What survives on Park Road?
Park Road's houses are exposed yellow brick with red brick detailing, two-over-two or three-over-three sashes and yellow brick stacks. The appraisal thinks most were slated, though some now carry concrete tiles, and finds that small changes, uPVC windows and oversized porches among them, have worn away their period character.
How are the west Bushey houses built?
The local list describes one Aldenham Road house as brick, pebble-dash rendered and two and a half storeys, under a part hipped and gabled tile roof with two large decorated chimney stacks; an Edwardian semi-detached villa on the list is red brick, partly pebble-dashed, at the same height. Render over brick and broken-up roofs send us looking for cracks, damp and roof spread first.
What do the High Road houses share?
The 2013 appraisal records small terraced cottages with slate roofs, high chimney pots and painted fronts next to large Victorian houses with decorative bargeboards. Roofs are almost all slate, walls brick or painted white or cream, windows timber sashes and casements, with uPVC creeping in.
What about North Bushey?
North Bushey is mostly mid-20th-century houses and bungalows, and the post-war estate around Bushey Mill Lane brought housing, a school and a row of shops. Here our questions are usually about the plot, the roof shape and the neighbours rather than heritage.
The ground matters as much as the walls. Hertsmere's 2023 flood assessment describes the soils across Bushey as clays of low permeability, seasonally waterlogged and with medium to high runoff potential, and it traces the Hilfield Brook east to west through North Bushey to the Colne at Watford. We size foundations and drainage from trial holes on the plot, not from the general picture.
Sources: Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): Bushey High Street Conservation Area Appraisal 2008, main report; Hertsmere Borough Council: List of Locally Listed Buildings, Appendix 5: Bushey and Bushey Heath (June 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): High Road Bushey Heath Conservation Area Appraisal, draft (April 2013); Hertsmere Borough Council: Draft Planning and Design Guide SPD Part D (draft for DM use and public consultation, October 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council / AECOM: Level 1 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment (2023)
On site
Bushey Heath lies south-east of the main town, beyond Sparrows Herne, where the county meets the London Borough of Harrow. It stands high, at around 130 metres above sea level along High Road, on London clay with gravel over it, and the borough's southern edge there is the upstream end of the Hartsbourne Stream.
Bushey Heath grew up after the heath was enclosed in 1808, along High Road, once part of the Sparrows Herne turnpike from London to Aylesbury, and by 1934 it had almost become a separate community. Besides its two conservation areas it holds the former Ministry of Defence housing at Farm Way, which Policy SADM31 treats as an area of distinctive character for its generous plots, wide verges and the absence of extensions to the original houses.
Stanmore is in the London Borough of Harrow, across that line, and we cover it on our Stanmore page, with Edgware on its own page too. Postcodes ignore the boundary: WD23 takes in the four Bushey wards together with Oxhey and Stanmore wards, and HA7 reaches Bushey Heath ward. We confirm the council from the address itself, because that decides where the application goes.
Parking is tight in the older streets. The Core Strategy names parking problems specific to Bushey Village and Bushey Heath, the High Street appraisal finds that the small front gardens of the Park Road terraces leave no room to solve it, and High Road through Bushey Heath carries heavy traffic to and from London.
A new or wider drive needs a dropped kerb, which only Hertfordshire County Council Highways may build. On an A, B or C road the crossing needs planning permission as well; on an unclassified road it does not. The wall, fence or hedge at that point has to come out before construction, and the finished crossing becomes part of the public highway.
On streets like Park Road we plan deliveries around the parked cars: where a lorry can stop, whether materials stand on the drive or in a licensed bay, and how the neighbours keep their access are settled and written into the site plan before anyone arrives.
Sources: Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): High Road Bushey Heath Conservation Area Appraisal, draft (April 2013); Hertsmere Borough Council / AECOM: Level 1 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment (2023); Hertsmere Borough Council: Draft Planning and Design Guide SPD Part D (draft for DM use and public consultation, October 2016); Hertsmere Borough Council: Site Allocations and Development Management Policies Plan (adopted November 2016); London Borough of Harrow: Conservation areas and Article 4; postcodes.io (ONSPD-derived): outcode WD23; postcodes.io (ONSPD-derived): outcode HA7; Hertsmere Borough Council: Local Plan Core Strategy DPD (adopted January 2013); Hertsmere Borough Council (BEAMS Ltd): Bushey High Street Conservation Area Appraisal 2008, main report; Hertsmere Borough Council: Dropped Kerbs and Crossovers
Scope
Our quote for a Bushey project comes after the survey and the planning route, so it prices the work the address allows rather than a guess at it.
We walk the house and garden with you, date the building, view the roof from road and garden, and note where materials would come in.
Conservation area, Article 4 direction, statutory or local listing, the Farm Way character area, flood warning area, nearby watercourses and protected trees are all looked up for that one address.
Every room is measured and the construction noted. Where the structure is uncertain we open up or dig a trial hole before our engineer designs anything.
Our architects draw the scheme to Hertsmere's design guide and the permitted development limits, or, where the address requires it, prepare the planning application.
You receive a written quote set out item by item, with the building regulations route, any party wall notices and the site set-up shown separately.
Our Hampstead base, serving Bushey
Our studio is in Hampstead on Finchley Road, at NW3 6DN. We serve Bushey from this office. Bring us the practical questions about your house, flat or bathroom and the result you want to achieve.
Contact the studio to discuss your brief and arrange the next step. If you already have drawings, a lease or planning correspondence, tell us what is available.
Book a free feasibility visitOur work
Our London team, in-house architects, designers and structural engineers working with Hampstead Chartered Surveyors & Building Consultancy, takes on projects in Bushey and Bushey Heath from our Finchley Road studio in Hampstead, NW3. Planning applications go to Hertsmere Borough Council; for building control you can use Hertfordshire Building Control or appoint a registered building control approver from the private sector.
The project below is in London. Look at it for how the work is organised rather than for the house itself: a Bushey scheme gets the same survey, drawings, engineering and site management, adjusted to the conservation area, the clay and the boundary questions on this page.
We take on whole houses and single rooms alike in Bushey, and if a heritage or planning constraint makes an idea unlikely to be approved, we say so at the feasibility stage rather than after the drawings.
Outside Bushey, and in London rather than Hertfordshire: Project example: Belsize Park, NW3. That project of ours is a Victorian townhouse of five storeys; its case study records a basement conversion, a rear extension and loft work, carried out together with a full refurbishment of the interior.
Sources: Hertsmere Borough Council: Hertfordshire Building Control Limited; GOV.UK: Building regulations approval (printable guide); Hampstead Renovations: Belsize Park Gardens, NW3 case study
Bushey questions
Bushey Heath runs up to the county edge, where the London Borough of Harrow begins, and Stanmore is on the Harrow side. The WD23 postcode takes in the Bushey wards as well as the Oxhey and Stanmore wards, and HA7 also reaches Bushey Heath ward, so the postcode alone does not settle it. It matters because the council that decides a planning application, and the policies it applies, depend on where the house sits relative to that line. We confirm it from the address before design starts.
The council's adopted SADM plan lists four: Bushey High Street (designated 22 January 1973), Bushey Heath High Road (28 March 1990), Bushey Heath The Lake (23 October 1998) and Melbourne Road, Bushey (11 December 2009). The 2013 draft appraisal of Bushey Heath High Road recommended removing that designation, but the council's list still includes it, so we confirm the position for any address there.
The council lists two directions covering Warren Road, The Comyns, The Lake, Coles Green and Rose Lawn, in the part of The Lake conservation area that also has its own Warren Estate guidance. An Article 4 direction removes some or all permitted development rights, and each direction is different. They are used where works such as certain extensions or changes to windows and doors would harm an area's character, particularly where visible from the public highway, so we read the direction for your road before drawing anything.
The Environment Agency's flood warning area for the River Colne at Watford is described as including Bushey, and the borough's 2023 flood assessment lists the River Colne near Bushey Hill Farm among the warning areas in Hertsmere. The council's flooding records put Bushey among the localities most often affected, and residents reported flooding around Little Bushey Lane and Finch Lane. Before design we put the exact address into the Environment Agency's Flood Map for Planning.
Planning applications for Bushey addresses are decided by Hertsmere Borough Council. The community governance review, which the council began on 16 September 2026 after a petition from Bushey residents, consults on creating a civil parish and a parish council for Bushey, which has neither at present. The council's page for the review deals with parish governance and says nothing about who decides planning applications.
Yes. Purpose-built flats housed 34.6% of Bushey Heath's households at the 2021 Census, and between 23.5% and 26.1% in the other three wards, so many Bushey enquiries are about flats. Our London-wide flat refurbishment page covers that work. Leasehold is the usual tenure for flats, and whether alterations need the landlord's permission is written into each lease, which we read before any design work.
Either Hertfordshire Building Control, which provides building control for the borough, or a private registered building control approver. Approval is separate from planning permission, and some work needs both. Without approval, the certificates of compliance that a sale may call for will be missing.
We look round the house and garden with you, date the building and note its materials, check the roof from the pavement, and hear what you would like to change. Afterwards we check the address for conservation area, Article 4, listing, flood and boundary questions, and tell you which planning and building control route the work would take before any drawing is made.
See how Bushey fits within our wider Hertfordshire pages.
Every service page we publish for Bushey.