House refurbishment in Surbiton

Bring the whole-house scope together.

Start with the house refurbishment brief

Survey the rooms, structure and building services before separating repairs from alterations. Identify the features to keep and the rooms that must remain usable, then coordinate heating, electrics, bathrooms, kitchens and finishes in one written scope.

Record allowances and exclusions against the drawings. Plan inspections before work is covered, agree how changes will be priced and keep a clear handover list for certificates, commissioning and snagging.

The local building context

Southborough Conservation Area was designated in January 1979 and extended in January 1989 and September 1991, according to the council’s page, and extended again in 2009 under the appraisal the Executive adopted that May. The council sums it up as large detached houses of the 1860s to 1930s around Southborough House, a Grade II building of 1808 by John Nash. The appraisal finds mainly detached houses on generous, well-treed plots, the larger ones mostly on Ashcombe Avenue, Corkran Road, Langley Avenue and Southborough Close, in red and yellow brick under natural red clay tiles.

Thomas Pooley conceived Surbiton’s New Town, and building began in 1838 around the landscaped Claremont Crescent Gardens. The Claremont Road area keeps stuccoed Regency-style semi-detached villas and terraces, with original examples on the north side of Victoria Road and the east sides of Claremont Road and St Philip’s Road, while Claremont Gardens has red-brick houses of 1890. St Andrew’s Square, a later phase, has three-storey Gothic brick terraces of 1876 to 1884, and the Cadogan Road area runs from short terraces in Cleveland Road to large Italianate villas on Cadogan Road and Grove Road.

The Victoria Avenue area, farmland until the early 1890s, has cohesive groups of two-storey red-brick houses built between 1893 and 1904. Surbiton Hill Park was built from 1864 to 1887 as a middle-class estate, its earliest houses Italianate. Oakhill follows the old turnpike of Ewell Road, with stock-brick terraces and villas with stucco dressings, and since 2009 has included 15–25 Langley Road, large houses of three storeys and semi-basement moved out of Southborough. Christchurch, in Berrylands, has houses of the 1860s to the 1880s around the Grade II Christ Church.

Local design and consent context

An Article 4 direction, as Kingston puts it, does not prevent development but requires planning permission to be sought for that type of work. The borough lists three. The Seething Wells Filter Beds direction, confirmed on 14 April 2021, protects the site’s biodiversity by removing the right to put up fences, gates and other enclosures on that site only. The commercial-to-residential direction, as modified by the Secretary of State on 14 June 2023, includes Surbiton District Centre and concerns turning commercial premises into homes. The third covers North Lodge and South Lodge.

Each Surbiton conservation area page, Southborough’s included, records no Article 4 direction. The 2009 Southborough appraisal listed Article 4(2) directions as a tool that could be applied where specific control is needed, but none has been made, so ask the council whether that has changed before planning work to the front of a house.

Kingston locally lists buildings it judges to have sufficient historic, architectural, townscape and environmental interest to be of local value. The 2009 Southborough appraisal lists houses on Corkran Road and Ditton Road, and the St Andrew’s Square page names 1–15, 32–40 and 33–39 St Andrew’s Square. The 2012 Core Strategy counted 24 listed buildings and 36 Buildings of Townscape Merit, the older name for locally listed buildings, in the Surbiton neighbourhood.

Access and site planning

The council can act on noise from building sites outside specified working hours, its noise page says, but the pages do not state those hours, so check with the council before arranging any early, late or weekend work. Its advice is to speak to neighbours first and reach agreement on the least intrusive times for noisy work. Above a shop or in a converted house, let the managing agent or freeholder know in writing when work starts and when the loudest stages fall, and agree at home whether to stay through them.

Continue planning

The Surbiton area guide · House refurbishment across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

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