Loft conversion in Edgware and Canons Park

Test the roof space before settling on a layout.

Start with the loft conversion brief

A measured roof survey should establish headroom, structural spans and where a staircase could meet the floor below. Plan the stair, escape route, insulation and building services together before treating the loft as another room.

Compare the proposed roof shape with the address-specific design guidance below. Record chimneys, shared walls and neighbouring rooflines, then ask the appointed designers to identify the structural work and consents the proposal needs.

The local building context

Canons Drive follows the eighteenth-century carriage drive to the mansion. Its houses, mostly detached and predominantly black-and-white Tudor Revival, have two storeys with rooms in the roof and stand well back behind wide grass verges and tall cedars; side roads have slightly narrower plots and more semi-detached houses. The appraisal names timber or metal casements often with leaded lights, tall brick chimneys, heavy wooden doors, multi-coloured red brick and clay tile or slate roofs. West of the A5, Harrow’s Edgware High Street conservation area holds some of Edgware’s oldest surviving buildings, timber-framed and dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Harrow’s 2021 study describes its side of Edgware as a varied mix of semi-detached houses, terraces, modern flats and post-war mansion blocks, and its 2011 assessment records 1930s modernist flat blocks at Edgware Court and two mansion blocks of the 1930s or 40s on Donnefield Avenue. In the town centre, mostly in Barnet, the joint Edgware Growth Area SPD describes three- to four-storey inter-war brick buildings with offices and flats on the floors above, and Barnet’s Census 2021 briefing places Edgware Central among the ten Barnet areas with the largest rise in purpose-built flats.

The names Edgware and Canons Park and an HA8 postcode do not settle the council, a conservation area boundary, a listing, Article 4 coverage or the consent route. The boundary between Harrow and Barnet runs along the middle of the High Street, and each council has a ward called Edgware. Confirm the council for the address first, then check that council’s current conservation area map and any Article 4 schedule, the statutory and local lists, the title or lease and the planning history.

Local design and consent context

The Edgware High Street conservation area, designated in 1980 and extended in 1991, lies wholly on the western side of the High Street, opposite Barnet. Its appraisal, adopted in December 2013 as appendix 5 to the same SPD, superseded a 2006 study, and its schedule covers 81 to 111 High Street (odd) and 1 to 12 Whitchurch Lane. Harrow’s table marks no Article 4 direction there.

Harrow explains that an Article 4 direction removes permitted development rights. In the Canons Park Estate, the direction confirmed on 5 June 1991 covers all land in the conservation area except the North London Collegiate School’s listed buildings and those within the park grounds, bringing hard surfaces, satellite antennas, gates, fences and walls, and new accesses to a highway under planning control, in classes made under the 1988 order; a direction confirmed on 20 May 2021 adds the demolition of any gate, fence, wall or other enclosure.

A direction confirmed on 21 November 2014 applies only to The Lodge, Donnefield Avenue, covering enlargement and alteration, porches, outbuildings, hard surfaces, satellite antennas, gates and walls, and exterior painting. The 2013 appraisal proposed a further Article 4(2) direction for windows, doors, roofs, chimneys and porches facing a highway, waterway or open space, but Harrow’s current schedule lists only the 1991, 2014 and 2021 directions, which add to the standard conservation-area controls, so check that schedule for the address.

Access and site planning

Plan deliveries, waste and protection for any shared hall or drive before work starts, and confirm which council manages the road outside. In Harrow, a skip on the public highway needs a licence obtained by the skip company, scaffolding a licence issued to the scaffolding company and building materials a licence even briefly; allow up to 10 working days for a parking-bay suspension. In Barnet, only registered skip companies are licensed for skips on the highway, any bay suspension a skip needs must be approved first, and the landowner stays ultimately responsible for licences a builder applies for. TfL licenses these only on its red routes; the GLA Roads Designation Order 2000, as made, named the A41, which Barnet’s Edgware ward map labels Edgware Way, from the London boundary to the A1, so check the road’s current status.

Continue planning

The Edgware and Canons Park area guide · Loft conversion across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

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