Kitchen renovation in Mill Hill

Plan the kitchen around movement, storage and services.

Start with the kitchen renovation brief

Map preparation, cooking, washing and storage before choosing cabinet fronts. Measure clearances with doors and drawers open, and decide which existing walls, floors and details belong in the finished room.

Coordinate the cabinetry with water, drainage, extraction, electrics and lighting. Confirm appliance dimensions and access for installation before the layout is signed off; structural alterations need their own design and approval checks.

The local building context

Barnet’s Mill Hill Conservation Area Character Appraisal Statement, adopted in April 2008, places the conservation area towards the north-west corner of the borough: about 152 hectares, with institutional buildings and houses strung out for a mile along the high ground of The Ridgeway, looking over Green Belt countryside from Burtonhole Lane to the south-east and Marsh Lane to the north. It counts approximately 260 houses, brick and weatherboard cottages typical of rural Middlesex among a large number of rambling institutional buildings, with three clusters of smaller houses and cottages along The Ridgeway.

The appraisal’s principal building types include timber-framed buildings from the late sixteenth century onwards, largely remodelled in brick or white or black weatherboard, with clay-tiled roofs, timber casements or sashes and low picket fences; Rosebank and Rosebank Cottage on The Ridgeway, a seventeenth-century timber-framed building, is listed at grade II. Small weatherboard and brick cottages of the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth century are another, such as the late eighteenth-century weatherboarded cottages on Hammers Lane, also grade II. Early timber-framed roofs are pitched at about 45 degrees in handmade clay tiles; most buildings after the mid-nineteenth century have Welsh slate.

The council, the conservation boundary, any listing and the consent route all depend on the exact property; the name Mill Hill and an NW7 postcode answer none of them. Use the government’s council lookup first; after that, work through the conservation area boundary map, the listed building records, the Article 4 orders and the January 1991 schedule of properties, the title or lease and the planning history of the property. The 2008 appraisal proposed taking one Marsh Lane house out of the boundary, so rely on the current map rather than older plans.

Local design and consent context

Green Belt is a different designation from the conservation area. The 2008 appraisal records the green open space within and around the conservation area as Green Belt, open land where development is strictly controlled to prevent urban sprawl, and planning data holds a current Green Belt record for Barnet. Ask Barnet whether land at the address lies in the Green Belt today, and treat that as a separate question from the conservation-area and Article 4 controls.

In 2008 the appraisal recorded 58 locally listed buildings in the conservation area, including Nos 1–5 Hendon Park Cottages, Winterstoke House and The Priory, and recommended considering others for the local list, among them the Retail Trust Cottages and Nos 1 to 3 Park Cottages, Wills Grove. Local listing is not statutory protection, although local policy then sought to preserve or enhance these buildings, so ask Barnet whether a building is on its current local list.

The appraisal also marks unlisted buildings as positive, mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century homes such as the late nineteenth-century cottages on Highwood Hill, The Ridgeway and Milespit Hill, and says an application to demolish one needs a reasoned justification similar to that for a listed building. It records Areas of Special Archaeological Significance, a 2006 plan designation, around Nan Clarks Lane and along The Ridgeway west of Hammers Lane, so ask whether they still apply.

Access and site planning

Delivery stops, waste storage and protection for any shared hall, stair or drive all need a plan before work starts. Barnet’s 2008 appraisal describes The Ridgeway and Highwood Hill as busy vehicular routes, with heavy school traffic on The Ridgeway, Wills Grove as a private shared-surface road with patchy, privately maintained surfacing, and Wills Grove and Winterstoke Gardens as informal roads with no pedestrian paths. Before scaffolding, a skip or materials go on the road or pavement, ask the highway authority which licence is needed and how much notice it requires; TfL issues such licences only on its red routes, so check whether the road outside is one.

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The Mill Hill area guide · Kitchen renovation across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

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