Bathroom renovation in Tooting

Design the room around water, waste and ventilation.

Start with the bathroom renovation brief

Record the room dimensions, existing fittings, drainage route and floor construction before choosing a layout. Include the shower or bath, storage, lighting, ventilation and the details that affect everyday use in the same brief.

Agree the waterproofing details, access to valves, finishes and testing before installation. If it is the only bathroom, discuss how the household will manage while the work is carried out.

The local building context

The Totterdown Fields appraisal calls the estate a very fine example of housing influenced by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements. Built between 1901 and 1911 as the LCC’s first cottage estate, it has two-storey cottages, mostly of yellow stock brick, some red, under slate roofs, with timber sash or casement windows, partly glazed doors and often roughcast upper storeys. Its fourth-class cottage held a separate ground-floor and first-floor flat, and each terrace reads as a single composition.

Just off Tooting High Street, the Mellison Road appraisal sets its small conservation area among predominantly late Victorian terraces and credits its character to knapped flint on the houses and boundary walls. Towards Tooting Bec Common, the Heaver Estate appraisal describes one of the borough’s highest-quality areas of late 19th-century suburban houses and flats, with stained glass, tessellated tile paths and cast-iron railings; the draft Holy Trinity appraisal finds Dalebury and Crockerton Roads, also built by Alfred Heaver, very similar.

The Tooting name appears in a Local Plan area strategy, a neighbourhood area, two Wandsworth wards, a parliamentary constituency and archaeological priority areas, none of which settles the rules for an address. Wandsworth’s Local Plan places Tooting station just outside the borough in Merton, a planning data reading puts Tooting Bec Gardens, SW16, in Lambeth, and yet Lambeth Cemetery and Streatham Cemetery lie in Wandsworth. Neither name nor postcode establishes the council, conservation boundary, listing, Article 4 coverage, freehold or consent route: check the full address, lease or title and planning history.

Local design and consent context

Treat that summary with care. The appraisal and the published schedules, which list house by house the fronts, rears and flanks covered, do not describe the same coverage or spell the streets alike, and the published file carries no date. Confirm with the council how the direction applies to your house before ordering windows or roofing. On the Heaver Estate, the appraisal records directions made on 20 June 1996 for single family houses and on 20 December 1996 for houses converted to flats.

Wandsworth designated the Tooting Bec and Broadway Neighbourhood Area and Forum on 4 April 2017, but no neighbourhood plan appears among its adopted plan documents, so ask the council about any later progress rather than assuming one exists. Under LP26, a house of 130 square metres or less, as first built, may become flats only where it is clearly shown to be unsuitable for families, and LP25 accepts the net loss of a home only in exceptional circumstances, such as combining no more than two non-family-sized homes into one family-sized home of 130 square metres or less.

Fitting out a cellar or lower ground room that already exists is a different job from excavating a new basement or enlarging one. Wandsworth has no basement Article 4 direction, and its Local Plan accepts that permitted development rights mean not every new basement needs planning consent; the council’s guidance still says permission is always needed for a flat, a listed building or a lightwell, that multi-level basements are not appropriate in the borough and that a flat may need freeholder consent.

Access and site planning

At a Wandsworth address, noise audible at the site boundary is normally permitted from 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and from 8am to 1pm on Saturdays. The council’s Construction Code of Practice, which it attaches to relevant planning approvals and building control applications, allows no noisy activities on Sundays or bank holidays and counts scaffolding as noisy work. Merton and Lambeth publish the same weekday and Saturday hours. A lease or block rules may be stricter; speak to neighbours early and arrange temporary facilities if you will live at home.

Continue planning

The Tooting area guide · Bathroom renovation across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

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