Builders in Golders Green NW11 for House Extensions and Loft Conversions — Two Conservation Areas, Nothing Alike

Golders Green town centre: a conservation area with 400 residents

The Golders Green Town Centre conservation area takes in the town centre together with the railway and the bus and coach station. The shopping centre straddles Finchley Road running north to south and Golders Green Road and North End Road running east to west, with the junction marked by a war memorial. It straddles two wards, Childs Hill and Hampstead Garden Suburb.

What it is not is a residential designation in any ordinary sense. The area is almost exclusively purpose-built parades with retail below and flats above, and around four hundred people live inside it. If you own one of those flats the designation matters a great deal. If you own a house on a street nearby, it very probably does not reach you at all.

What the 1998 designation actually covers

Barnet designated it in March 1998, and the character appraisal identifies the parades themselves as the thing being protected — the rhythm of the shopfronts, the upper storeys above them and the way the whole composition addresses the road junction.

For a flat above a parade that shapes what can be done to windows, to the roof and to anything visible from the street, while leaving internal work considerably freer. It also means the freeholder and any managing agent are part of the conversation, because a flat over a shop is rarely held on anything but a lease.

Most Golders Green houses sit outside both

This is the part worth establishing before you commission anything. The residential streets that make up the bulk of NW11 — the inter-war semis and detached houses running out towards Brent Cross and Temple Fortune — fall outside the town centre designation and outside the Suburb boundary.

On those addresses permitted development still covers a good deal of ground — extending at the back, squaring off a hipped roof and putting up a garden building can all happen without troubling the council. Where a scheme does qualify, a lawful development certificate from Barnet records it for a future sale. We confirm which of the three positions applies to your address against the council’s own boundaries before anything is drawn.

The rear extension on a 1930s semi

Houses of this period lend themselves to being enlarged. The gardens run a long way back, the rooms were sized for a household organised on different lines, and the kitchen was put at the far end of the plan rather than where everyone now congregates. Take the back wall out across the whole width and what you get is one room the full breadth of the property, kitchen and living space together, with the garden on the other side of the glass.

The ground underneath and the drains through it are what govern the build. Where mature trees stand close by, how deep to take the foundations becomes something to work out for that particular plot instead of applying a rule of thumb — and our structural engineers answer it during the survey, not once the digger has arrived.

Side access, and the wraparound it allows

Side access is the quiet advantage of this stock. Practically it means materials and waste move without passing through the house, which shortens the programme and spares the rooms you are still living in. Structurally it opens options a terrace never has.

Going out sideways adds breadth where a rear extension only adds depth, and a wraparound does not simply make the ground floor bigger — it lets you redraw it. Where a plot takes both, the decision turns into a trade: how much outside space you are willing to lose. Filling the whole allowance is frequently the wrong call, and we will tell you when we think it is.

Squaring off a hipped roof

The hipped roofs on the inter-war houses waste a substantial volume at the end of the building. Rebuild that end vertically and what was loft space starts behaving like a proper storey. Put a dormer on the back at the same time and the result is commonly a pair of rooms with a bathroom, not one bedroom under a slope.

Where two houses are joined, both roofs matter to the outcome, because your new gable will be seen against whatever your neighbour has left untouched. Beyond the reach of either designation the work frequently needs no application. Within one, it does — and the case then has to be made from the merits of your own house rather than from anything nearby.

What a previous owner already used up

A large share of NW11 houses carry an earlier extension, and what counts is the dwelling as first constructed, not the one that appeared on the particulars when you bought. A property with a 1980s rear addition and a converted garage may have considerably less left than the plot suggests.

It is the first thing we check, because it changes the route rather than the design. A scheme that would have been permitted development on an unaltered house becomes a full application on this one, and knowing that at the outset is the difference between a realistic programme and an optimistic one.

What one firm covers

The conventional route is four appointments — an architect to draw it, an engineer to prove it, a surveyor for the neighbour notices and a builder to construct it. It works, and coordinating them falls to the homeowner. Where a tender comes back above what the design assumed, or a detail belongs to nobody in particular, the resolution is at your cost.

Keep it inside one business and the picture changes. Drawing and calculation happen alongside each other here, our architects and engineers in the same conversation, so no proposal reaches you that the ground or the structure would refuse. Where the council has to be involved, we write the submission and defend it. Notices to neighbours are drafted and served by our own surveyors — and in a house sharing a wall, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 catches nearly any structural job. The construction is then carried out by people we employ, working to a single schedule with one person carrying it.

Who has to agree, and in what order

In NW11 that question has a different answer depending on the address, and getting the sequence wrong is what costs months. On an ordinary street the council may not need to be involved at all. Above a parade, the freeholder and the council both do. Inside the Suburb and within the Trust’s scheme, there are two separate consents and neither guarantees the other.

We establish the full list at survey and pursue them in parallel rather than one after another, because consents that run alongside each other take weeks and consents that run in sequence take seasons.