Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Kettering and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Kettering and the villages around it. It is a town where two houses on neighbouring streets can be the same age and completely different propositions, and telling them apart is most of the skill. The test worth applying to builders in Kettering is not whether they have worked on a Victorian terrace, but whether they can tell you which sort yours is.
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 North 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 thisKettering expanded very fast in the nineteenth century on the back of the shoe trade, and it built for everybody at once. The result is a town where the Victorian housing comes in distinct grades, laid out within a few streets of each other, and those grades behave completely differently when you start work on them.
At one end there are the rows of artisan housing near the factories: small, tightly built, solid walled, shallow founded, with modest joinery and roof timbers sized to a budget. Good honest houses, and ones where almost everything is close to its limit, so an opening or a loft conversion needs the structure checking rather than assuming.
At the other end are the residential areas laid out for the managers and the factory owners. Larger plots, deeper foundations, better brick, heavier timbers, more generous roofs. These take alteration far more comfortably and they are the easier and more rewarding half of our older work here.
Between the two sits everything else, and the point is that you cannot tell which you have from the date alone. A house from 1885 in Kettering might be either. We survey rather than assume, because pricing an owner’s villa job on an artisan terrace, or the reverse, gets somebody hurt financially.
The town centre is older again and keeps its medieval street pattern, focused on the Church of St Peter and St Paul, with Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings around it. Beyond all of that the town has the usual interwar, post-war and modern estate housing, out through Barton Seagrave and the edges, which is the most straightforward stock we work on.
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 Kettering street to the next.
North 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.
The Kettering area has 26 conservation areas and 538 listed buildings, which is a substantial amount of designation for a town of this size, and it means the designation check is not a formality here. Inside a conservation area the permitted development limits reduce and a side extension loses its permitted development rights entirely.
What makes Kettering distinctive from a planning point of view is that its Victorian suburbs survive little altered from when they were laid out. That is exactly why several of them are designated, and it changes what the council is looking at. In a street where the original pattern is intact, an alteration that would pass without comment on a mixed street is conspicuous, and the more coherent the street, the less tolerance there is for breaking the rhythm.
The corollary is useful: work behind the building line is a much easier conversation than work in front of it, and that is where most of what people want actually sits.
On the interwar, post-war and modern 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.
Because North Northamptonshire is a unitary authority, the council deciding your planning application is also the highway authority, so a skip standing on a public road in Kettering 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. The same applies to scaffold standing on a footway.
In the tighter Victorian terraces 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. That does not stop the work, but it changes the sequence and the price, and it needs establishing before the first lorry is booked.
On the manager’s villa plots and out through Barton Seagrave a driveway is 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 Burton Latimer, Wellingborough, and Corby.
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.
