Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Leamington Spa and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works across Leamington Spa and the villages around it. It is a town that rewards knowing what you are looking at, because a great deal of what people take for stone here is render over brick, and the two need completely different treatment. It is worth asking builders in Leamington Spa what they think your frontage is made of before they price putting it right, because getting that wrong is expensive in both directions.
Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across the town. We look after the Building Regulations side of the work, arranging the inspections and seeing the job through to sign off, and you get a price in writing before anything starts.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the Warwick District Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
These are the trades we carry out ourselves. Every one leads to a page describing that work in detail.
Footings, brickwork, roof and full fit out
More about this
Patios, paving, decking, fencing and turf
More about thisLeamington is a Regency town with a Victorian town attached to it and a modern one around the edge, and the Regency part is what makes building here different from anywhere else we work.
The great terraces and villas of the spa era are brick, faced in stucco and painted. That single fact drives most of what follows. Stucco is a soft, breathable render, and it was never designed to be sealed. A century and a half of well meant maintenance has left a lot of it under modern cement render or modern masonry paint, both of which trap moisture in a wall that needs to lose it. Where that has happened you get blown render, damp inside and salts coming through, and the cure is not more paint.
These buildings also have features the rest of the county does not: basements and front lightwells, cast iron railings, deep parapets hiding the gutters, and tall sash windows in openings that were never square to begin with.
A great many of the larger properties were divided into flats during the twentieth century. That matters practically, because work in one flat is frequently work on a structure shared with several other households, and the consents needed are not the ones a householder expects.
Away from the spa core the picture is ordinary and much simpler: Victorian and Edwardian terracing, interwar and post-war semis out through Lillington, Sydenham and Whitnash, and modern estate housing on the edges. That is the most straightforward stock we work on and it is priced accordingly.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding Warwickshire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Leamington Spa street to the next.
Warwick District Council is the local planning authority. The district has 29 conservation areas, and four of them sit in the Leamington area alone: Royal Leamington Spa, Lillington Road North, Lillington Village and the Canalside. If you are anywhere near the centre of town, assume you are in one until you have checked.
Warwick District Council publishes separate guidance specifically on painting buildings in the Leamington Spa conservation area. Councils do not write documents about paint colour unless it matters, and in a town whose character is largely made of painted stucco terraces, it matters a great deal. If your building is in the conservation area, treat the finish and the colour as something to check rather than something to choose off a card, and check it before the scaffold goes up rather than after the first coat.
Leamington has a lot of them, and listing covers the whole building inside and out, not just the frontage. Listed building consent is a separate matter from planning permission and doing work without it is a criminal offence rather than a paperwork problem. We ask about listing at the first visit, every time, because the answer changes the entire job.
Out on the later housing the ordinary rules apply, and a single storey rear extension often falls within permitted development. Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations, and a full plans application is still required. We do not make that application, but we arrange and meet the inspections that follow it and we see the work through to sign off.
Warwick District Council decides your planning application, but Warwickshire County Council is the highway authority, so a skip standing on a public road in Leamington is licensed by the county. The application has to come from the skip owner rather than from you or from us, and it must be in no less than five working days before the skip is placed. There is a £97 administration and inspection fee, and the skip company needs £10m public liability cover.
On the terraces and crescents there is often no rear access at all, a lightwell between the pavement and the front door, and controlled parking on the street. Everything comes through the building. It is entirely workable and we do it regularly, but it changes the sequence and the price, and anyone quoting the same rate here as on a Whitnash semi has not looked at the access.
Driveways are the norm, no licence is needed, and both the fee and about a week of lead time come out of the job.
We also work across Warwick, Kenilworth, and Coventry.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
