Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Leicester and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works across Leicester. It is a city where the planning answer changes street by street more sharply than almost anywhere else we work, and knowing that before you draw anything saves months. A general answer about permitted development is worth very little here, so it is fair to ask builders in Leicester what they have checked against your address in particular.
Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across the city and its edges. 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 Leicester City 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 thisLeicester grew by swallowing villages, and you can still see the joins. That is the most useful way to understand its housing.
Evington and Humberstone were separate places before the city reached them, and both are conservation areas now, with cores that are older and finer grained than the streets that surround them. Working on a house in one of those cores is a different proposition from working on the interwar housing a few hundred yards away, even though both have a Leicester postcode.
Between the old villages and the centre sits the city’s great asset and its great constraint: mile after mile of Victorian and Edwardian terracing and villa housing, built as the city expanded. Stoneygate, about two and a half miles south east of the centre, is the best preserved example, taking in parts of London Road, Knighton Park Road and Ratcliffe Road. These are generous, well built houses with deep plots and substantial joinery, and they are among the most rewarding buildings we work on.
They are also solid walled, shallow founded by modern standards, and in the case of the larger ones frequently divided into flats during the twentieth century, which changes who has to agree to what.
Beyond that the city has the usual interwar, post-war and modern estate housing, out through Aylestone, Birstall and the edges. Cavity walls, driveways, side access and predictable construction. That is the most straightforward stock 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 Leicestershire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Leicester street to the next.
Leicester City Council is the local planning authority and the city has 24 conservation areas, from the former villages of Evington and Humberstone through to the Edwardian High Street and Stoneygate.
This is the single most important thing to know about altering a house in Leicester. Article 4 directions apply in the Stoneygate conservation area and to most properties in the New Walk conservation area, and what those directions do is require planning permission for external alterations including the replacement of windows and doors.
Replacing your own windows is something almost everybody assumes is theirs to decide. In those two areas it is not. The direction exists because the windows are a large part of what makes the streets look the way they do, and a run of Victorian sashes with three modern units dropped into it is visible from a hundred yards. If you live in either area, treat windows and doors as an application rather than a purchase, and talk to us or to the council before you order anything.
Designated in 1969, one of the first three conservation areas declared in the city and now the second largest, New Walk is protected closely and the Article 4 covers most of it.
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.
This one catches out contractors from outside the city constantly. Across the rest of Leicestershire, in Hinckley, Burbage, Lutterworth and the county districts, a skip on a public road is licensed by Leicestershire County Council as highway authority. Leicester is a unitary authority and is its own highway authority, so inside the city a skip is licensed by Leicester City Council instead.
If a builder tells you they are applying to the county for a job in Stoneygate, they have not worked here before. 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.
On the Victorian terraced streets there is often nowhere to stand a skip except the carriageway, and many of those streets are under residents’ parking schemes. We sort the practicalities before the first delivery rather than discovering them with a lorry outside.
The larger villa plots usually have a drive, and where a skip stands on your own ground no licence is needed at all.
We also work across Burbage, Hinckley, and Lutterworth.
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.
