Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Northampton and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Northampton and the villages around it. It is a town whose older housing was built around an industry rather than around family life, and that shows up the moment you start altering it. A house built around an industry has quirks that do not show on a floor plan, so it is worth asking builders in Northampton whether they have opened one up before.
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 West Northamptonshire 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 thisNorthampton made shoes, and the housing was built to serve that. It is not a footnote here, it is the reason large parts of the town look and behave the way they do.
North and east of the town centre lies the Boot and Shoe Quarter, now a conservation area, and it is an unusual piece of townscape. Victorian shoe factories sit interleaved with the terraced housing of the people who worked in them, rather than being segregated into an industrial district. The survival rate is remarkable, around seventy per cent of the buildings associated with the industry are still standing, and the area has the widest range of building types in the town.
For a builder that mixture has real consequences. The boundary between a former works and a house is not always where you would expect. Party walls are shared between buildings that were never the same use. Rear yards that look like gardens were working yards, often with a small workshop building at the end that has since become a shed, a garage or an extension. When we survey in this part of town we establish what a building actually was before assuming what it is.
The terraces themselves are solid walled, shallow founded by modern standards, and built tight. Beyond them, out through Kingsthorpe, Duston, Weston Favell and the later estates, the town is much more ordinary: interwar and post-war semis, then modern estate housing with cavity walls, side access and gardens with room in them. That is the most straightforward stock we work on.
The town also carries 450 listed buildings, sixteen of them at Grade I, which is a lot for a place of this size and worth checking against before any design is settled.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding Northamptonshire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Northampton street to the next.
West Northamptonshire Council is the local planning authority. It is a unitary council, so planning, building control and the roads all sit with the same authority.
Northampton has twenty of them, and the Boot and Shoe Quarter is the one most likely to affect a house we are asked to work on. Inside a conservation area the permitted development limits reduce and side extensions lose their permitted development rights entirely. In the Boot and Shoe Quarter the council is also concerned with the industrial fabric, not only the housing, so alterations to a former works or to a rear workshop building get looked at differently from the same work on an ordinary terrace.
Northampton has a borough wide Article 4 direction, and it is worth being precise about it because it causes a great deal of unnecessary worry. It covers the creation of new houses in multiple occupation. If you intend to convert a family house into shared accommodation, that needs planning permission here rather than being automatic, anywhere in the borough. If you are extending or altering your own home to live in, this direction does not apply to you at all.
On the interwar, post-war and modern housing across the town 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.
Because West Northamptonshire is unitary, the council that decides your planning application is also the highway authority, so a skip standing on a public road in Northampton is licensed by the same council. The application is made by the skip company rather than by you or by us, and it needs to be in before the skip is due rather than on the day.
In the boot and shoe streets there is frequently nowhere to stand a skip except the carriageway, no off street parking, and a frontage too narrow to take a delivery without blocking the road. There is one saving grace: many of these terraces have a rear entry or alleyway serving the old working yards, and where one exists it changes the job completely. We look for it at the survey.
Driveways are the norm, no licence is needed, and both the cost and about a week of lead time come out of the job.
We also work across Wellingborough, Daventry, and Burton Latimer.
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.
