Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Nuneaton and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works across Nuneaton and the villages around it. It is a town where the ground under a plot varies more sharply over a short distance than almost anywhere else we work, and that is worth taking seriously before a foundation is designed. Before a price is agreed it is worth knowing what builders in Nuneaton have assumed about the ground, and whether anybody has dug to find out.
Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks on the housing 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 Nuneaton & Bedworth 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 thisNuneaton was not one industry but three, and the housing followed each of them.
Coal has been mined here since the fourteenth century, and the Stockingford and Griff area of Chilvers Coton was worked for five hundred years, with a real boom from the mid-1860s once the railways arrived. But Nuneaton was also a quarrying town and a brick making town, which is what separates it from its neighbour down the road. Judkins Quarry took granite out of the ground on a scale that left Mount Judd behind as a spoil tip, and it is still the thing you see first coming into the town.
That mixture shows up in the buildings. Nuneaton brick is local, made from local clay, and it has a colour range that modern stock rarely matches straight off a pallet. When we extend an older Nuneaton house, matching the brick properly is a real exercise rather than a formality, and it is the difference between an extension that reads as part of the house and one that reads as an extension.
The stock itself runs from Victorian terracing around Chilvers Coton and Stockingford, through the interwar and post-war expansion, to substantial modern estate development at Weddington, Whitestone and on the edges. Weddington is a case in point: the hall there was demolished in 1928 to make way for housing, which is a fair summary of how much of this town grew.
Chilvers Coton has a literary footnote worth knowing, since it turns up in conversation on site. Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot, lived at Griff House from 1820 to 1841 and worshipped at All Saints, which she wrote up as Shepperton.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding Warwickshire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Nuneaton street to the next.
Nuneaton & Bedworth Borough Council is the local planning authority. Planning applications and building control both go through the borough, though you can use an approved inspector for building control instead if you prefer.
Of the borough’s five conservation areas, two are in Nuneaton: the town centre and Abbey. Abbey carries an Article 4 direction, which means permitted development rights that apply elsewhere have been removed there, and work you would reasonably expect to be automatic needs permission first. If your property is in it, check before you plan rather than after, because the Article 4 is the part people miss.
In a conservation area the council takes a close interest in materials, and in a town built out of its own brick that is a more demanding requirement than it sounds. We source to match rather than to a specification sheet, and where a match genuinely cannot be found we would rather discuss a deliberate contrast with you and the council than hope a near miss goes unnoticed.
On the interwar, post-war and modern housing across the town 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.
The Victorian terracing around Chilvers Coton and Stockingford was built tight. If work comes near or against a shared boundary you are likely to need a party wall award, and we raise that at quotation stage rather than three weeks into the dig.
The borough handles your planning application, but Warwickshire County Council is the highway authority, so a skip standing on a public road in Nuneaton is licensed by the county. The application has to come from the skip owner rather than from you or from us, and it must be in no less than five working days before the skip is placed. A £97 administration and inspection fee applies and the skip company needs £10m public liability cover.
On the harder ground in parts of this town, excavation produces spoil that is heavier and bulkier than the same hole would yield elsewhere, and broken rock does not compact back into the space it came from. That means more grab lorry movements than people expect, and it is one of the specific things we work out at quotation stage here rather than absorbing later.
No licence is needed at all. Out through Weddington, Whitestone and the modern estates that is usually the position, and it takes both the fee and about a week of lead time out of the 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.
