Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Market Harborough and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Market Harborough and the villages around it. It is a town where the front of your house is more closely controlled than in most places, and knowing that before you order windows or take down a wall saves a great deal of trouble. A quotation that has not checked your address against the Article 4 direction is a quotation for a different job, which is the first thing to raise with builders in Market Harborough.
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 Harborough 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 thisMarket Harborough is a market town with a distinct and well preserved suburb attached to it, and the two are treated differently by the planning system.
The town has its own conservation area covering the historic core, with the coaching town fabric that goes with a place that sat on a main route north. Older brick and render, tight plots near the centre, and buildings that have been adapted repeatedly for commercial use over two centuries.
Little Bowden is the part that changes how a builder works here. It is a separate conservation area with an Article 4 direction over it, and what that direction protects is specifically the front of the buildings and the boundaries in front of them. Walk it and you can see why: the frontages and the walls, hedges and railings in front of them are the character of the place, and one wrong intervention is visible from a long way off.
Away from those two areas the town has the ordinary range: Victorian and Edwardian brick, interwar and post-war semis, and substantial modern estate development on the edges. Cavity walls, driveways, side access, and gardens with room to work in. Those are the most straightforward jobs we do here and they are priced accordingly.
The surrounding villages, Great Bowden, Lubenham, Foxton, Theddingworth and the rest, have their own conservation areas and their own answers, and a cottage in one of them is a different proposition from a house on a Harborough estate two miles away.
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 Market Harborough street to the next.
Harborough District Council is the local planning authority for Market Harborough and the surrounding villages. Planning applications and building control both go through the district, though you can use an approved inspector for building control instead if you prefer.
This is the thing to know before you plan anything in Little Bowden. The Article 4 direction there removes further permitted development rights specifically for front elevation alterations and boundary treatments.
The second half of that is the one people miss entirely. Boundary treatment means the wall, the fence, the railings, the gate and the hedge at the front of your property. Replacing a tired front wall with something different, taking one out to widen a drive, or putting up a fence where there was a hedge are all things householders reasonably assume they can simply do, and in Little Bowden they are planning matters.
The council has also acted specifically on this: on 21 May 2020 it served an Immediate Article 4 Direction on land at Queen’s Street, Little Bowden, removing permitted development rights so that permission is required for works including erecting a gate, fence or wall, in order to protect the character and appearance of the area.
We check the designation before quoting anything at the front of a Little Bowden property, and that includes work most builders would not think to check.
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.
Harborough District Council handles 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 Market Harborough 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 arrives rather than on the day. The same applies to scaffold standing on a footway.
In Little Bowden in particular, the area in front of a property is part of what is being protected. That has a practical consequence people rarely anticipate: stacking materials on a front garden, temporarily removing a boundary wall to get plant in, or laying a temporary hardstanding are not neutral acts there. We plan the site set up around that rather than treating the frontage as free space.
On the later housing 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. Village lanes are narrow, so deliveries get sized to what can actually get down them.
We also work across Corby, Kettering, 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.
