Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Banbury and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Banbury and the villages around it. Banbury is the one town on our patch where the traditional building material is stone rather than brick, and that changes almost every trade we practise. There are plenty of builders in Banbury who will quote for stonework, and the useful test is whether they can say what your wall is built of before pricing the repair.
Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across the town and the surrounding villages. 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 Cherwell 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 thisThe first thing to establish about a Banbury property is what it is made of, because unlike every other town we work in, the answer is not automatically brick.
North Oxfordshire sits on ironstone, and the local stone, including Hornton stone from the village of that name a few miles out, carries a high iron ore content. That is what gives it the warm honey and rust colouring that defines the villages around Banbury and the older edges of the town itself. It is a genuinely beautiful material and it is not a material you can treat like brick.
Stone of this kind is relatively soft and porous. It was laid in lime mortar, it was built to breathe, and it weathers by shedding a face rather than by cracking. All of which means the standard modern approach, a hard cement pointing mix and an impermeable coating, does more damage here than almost anywhere else. When a stone wall in this area is failing, the cause is very often something well intentioned that was done to it in the last fifty years.
Alongside the stone the town has the ordinary range. Victorian brick terracing in Grimsbury and Neithrop, interwar and post-war semis, and substantial modern estate development on the edges. Those are conventional jobs, straightforward to price, and the majority of what we do here.
The villages are different again. Adderbury, Bloxham, Hanwell, Hornton, Cropredy and Wroxton are stone villages with their own conservation areas, and a cottage in one of them is a different planning and technical proposition from a house on a Banbury estate four miles away.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding Oxfordshire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Banbury street to the next.
Cherwell District Council is the local planning authority. The district has 60 conservation areas, which restrict permitted development rights in the historic cores of Banbury and Bicester and across a great many Oxfordshire villages.
Cherwell’s design guidance places particular emphasis on using locally appropriate materials, respecting established building lines and maintaining the character of the street scene. In a district defined by a distinctive local stone, that is not boilerplate. An extension in reconstituted stone that reads as slightly the wrong colour will be noticed, and in a conservation area it will be the reason an application struggles.
We source stone to match rather than to a specification sheet, and where a genuine match cannot be found we would rather discuss a deliberate and honest contrast with you and the council than hope a near miss goes unremarked. Reclaimed stone has a lead time, and that belongs in the programme from the start.
Both have published conservation area appraisals, and those documents are worth reading before a design is settled because they describe what the council considers important street by street.
Outside the designated areas 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.
Cherwell District Council decides your planning application, but Oxfordshire County Council is the highway authority, so a skip standing on a public road in Banbury is licensed by the county rather than the district. 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.
Access to the stone villages around Banbury is usually generous on the plot and poor on the approach. Lanes are narrow, often with no passing places and frequently with stone walls on both sides that will not forgive a lorry misjudging a corner. We size deliveries to what can genuinely get down the lane rather than booking an artic and finding out.
On the estates and the later housing there is usually a driveway, no licence is needed, and both the fee and about a week of lead time come out of the job.
We also work across Daventry, Leamington Spa, and Stratford-upon-Avon.
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.
