Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Hinckley and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Hinckley and the villages around it. It is a straightforward run for us across the county boundary, which means a site visit here is a normal part of the week rather than something to be scheduled around. Being just over the boundary is why some builders in Hinckley treat the town as an outlying job, and a firm that prices it that way will visit like it too.
Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks on the houses in and around 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 Hinckley & Bosworth Borough 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 thisHinckley was a hosiery town, and it is still legible in the buildings. Framework knitting arrived here around 1640 and shaped the housing for the next two and a half centuries.
The oldest surviving evidence of it is the Framework Knitters’ Cottages, which date from about 1680. They are timber framed with brick nogging, and the giveaway is the windows: there are more of them than a cottage of that age would normally have, because the frames inside needed light to work by. The cottages now house Hinckley and District Museum. Very few houses of that age come up for work, but the principle carries into the later stock, which was also built around what people did indoors.
The Druid Street quarter is the next layer and the most substantial. Most of the buildings there went up between 1887 and 1903, when the trade moved from frames in the front room to powered factories, and the area escaped the modern redevelopment that flattened comparable districts elsewhere. It is solid late Victorian brick, built tight, with the industrial buildings and the housing interleaved.
Beyond that the picture is more ordinary and more straightforward to work on: interwar and post-war semi-detached out towards Hollycroft and Sketchley, and modern estate development on the edges of the town and out through Burbage and Barwell. These usually have side access, cavity walls and a garden with room to work in, and they are the most predictable jobs we do here.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding Leicestershire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Hinckley street to the next.
Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council is the local planning authority for the town and the surrounding villages. Planning applications and building control both go through the borough, though you can use an approved inspector for building control instead if you prefer.
Many single storey rear extensions on the interwar, post-war and modern housing around Hinckley fall within permitted development, which means no planning application is needed. 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.
The town has several, and the one that most affects the housing we work on is Druid Street, designated in January 2002 specifically to recognise what the hosiery industry did to the shape of the town. There are also conservation areas covering the town centre and Hollycroft. Inside any of them, permitted development rights are reduced and the council has extra control over what can be done without permission, so the designation gets checked before anything is drawn.
Druid Street deserves a particular word. Because the buildings there are tightly dated to a fifteen year window at the end of the Victorian period, the area reads as a whole, and alterations that would pass unnoticed on a mixed street are conspicuous. Windows and frontages are where that bites hardest. Work behind the building line is a much easier conversation.
The late Victorian housing here was built tight, so shared boundaries are close more often than not. If work comes near or against one you are likely to need a party wall award. We raise that at quotation stage rather than three weeks into the dig.
Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council deals with your planning application, but it does not license skips. Leicestershire County Council is the highway authority, so a skip standing on a public road in Hinckley needs a licence from the county. 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 late Victorian streets around Druid Street were laid out before cars and it shows. There is often nowhere to stand a skip except the carriageway, no off street parking for a van, and a frontage too narrow to take a delivery without blocking the road. None of that stops the work, but it changes the sequence and it changes the price, and it needs to be established before the first lorry is booked.
Driveways are the norm on the later housing, and where a skip can stand on your own ground no licence is needed at all. That takes both cost and about a week of lead time out of a job.
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.
