House extension in Purley

Connect the added space to the existing home.

Discuss your project

Start with the house extension brief

Begin with how the new space will meet the old rooms, garden and circulation. A measured brief should record boundaries, levels, existing drains, neighbouring windows and the parts of the building you intend to keep.

Develop daylight, structure and services alongside the floor plan. Agree which openings and finishes are included, how the existing home will be protected during construction and which decisions need surveys or approval before a quotation.

The local building context

The Webb Estate covers about 260 acres west of Purley town centre, and the 2007 appraisal says it and Upper Woodcote Village were purpose-built between 1903 and 1925. William Webb, a local estate agent, landscaped the land before building started, laying out curving roads without right-angled junctions, grass footpaths on most of them and a planting scheme for each road; Promenade de Verdun is his one straight road. Croydon designated the estate in June 1983, added Furze Lane in 1984 and extended it in June 2007 to take in lodge bungalows and the whole of Furze Lane and Furze Hill.

Upper Woodcote Village, laid out in 1903 in the estate’s south-western corner and designated in November 1973, is a model village around a four-acre green, the estate’s only open space, which Croydon Council owns and manages. Its cottages were meant for estate workers but proved too expensive and were sold privately. The council’s updated draft counts one detached and five semi-detached workers’ cottages by Webb, and its 2026 version describes Nos 11–12, 15–16 and 17–18 as two-storey Mock Tudor pairs with mock-timber framing above white roughcast.

The 2007 appraisal notes that most of Webb’s original houses were white rendered and newer ones tend to be red brick. The updated draft adds houses mostly of brick with roughcast lower walls, timber and leaded windows, half-timbering and pitched roofs with subordinate gables or hips, in Arts and Crafts, Tudor Revival and Neo-Georgian styles. For Purley as a whole, the Croydon Local Plan 2018 describes the housing away from Brighton Road as large detached houses on relatively large plots and low-density scattered houses on relatively small plots.

Local design and consent context

Regulations made in 2026 keep in force any supplementary planning document already in effect, and in June 2026 the council still called the 2007 document the adopted appraisal. Its report also said the update would introduce no new statutory controls and no boundary changes. Treat the 2007 appraisal as the guidance to follow and the updated draft as background description only.

Permission will not normally be granted to subdivide existing single plots, or for uses in conflict with the residential character, flat conversions included. Extensions are discouraged unless they make a positive contribution to the landscape character, any development over two storeys must show it does not dominate the site, and garages and outbuildings should not sit in front of the main building line. Render, where used, should preferably be white.

Croydon’s Article 4 page lists every direction in the borough, and none covers the Webb Estate or Upper Woodcote Village; elsewhere in Purley, check your street against that list. Croydon’s conservation areas page names Chatsworth Road, The Waldrons and Kenley Aerodrome as the conservation areas covered by Article 4 directions. For these two areas, the 2007 appraisal only reserved the council’s right to make a direction, and the 2026 report and Consultation Statement said none was proposed. The one direction that applies in both areas is borough-wide: made on 28 January 2019, it requires planning permission to turn a house or flat into a small house in multiple occupation.

Access and site planning

Croydon expects contractors to follow its Construction Code of Practice, which confines noisy work to weekdays between 8am and 6pm and Saturday mornings between 8am and 1pm, rules it out on Sundays and bank holidays, and asks for noise to be kept as low as is practicable whatever the hour. Noise carries even between large plots, so tell neighbours in advance when the noisiest days fall; over a shop, settle access and quiet periods with the freeholder and the business underneath.

Continue planning

The Purley area guide · House extension across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

Discuss your project

Tell us what you are planning in Purley

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