Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Wellingborough and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Wellingborough and the villages around it. The town sits in the Nene valley, and that position affects more of the work here than anything about the buildings themselves. The useful question for builders in Wellingborough is not what they would build, but what they have assumed about the ground under it.
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 North Northamptonshire 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 thisWellingborough is a valley town, and the ground rather than the architecture is what most often decides how a job here runs.
The town and its villages sit in the Nene valley, a landscape of ironstone villages and river meadows, and the council expects new design to respond to that character. For a builder the valley position means something more practical: ground conditions vary with how close you are to the river and how low you sit in it, and water is closer to the surface in some parts of the town than owners expect. That shows up in foundations, in basements and cellars, and in whether a soakaway will ever work.
The buildings themselves cover the usual range. There are 11 Grade I listed buildings in the area, among them All Hallows Church of about 1160, which is the oldest building in Wellingborough, and the remains of the Croyland Abbey grange. Around them sits a historic town centre, Victorian and Edwardian brick, interwar and post-war semis, and substantial modern development including the large new neighbourhoods on the edges of the town.
One thing about the older stock is worth knowing before anybody starts matching materials. The local building stone came from small quarries around the town, and the expansion of Wellingborough through the twentieth century saw those quarries disappear. Large scale ironstone extraction, which peaked here between 1900 and 1940, was for the blast furnaces rather than for building. The result is that the stone in an old Wellingborough or village wall is genuinely local and genuinely hard to match today.
The villages, Earls Barton, Irchester, Wollaston, Finedon and the rest, have their own conservation areas and their own answers.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding Northamptonshire villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Wellingborough street to the next.
North Northamptonshire Council is the local planning authority. It is a unitary council, so planning, building control and the roads all sit with the same authority.
Wellingborough has ten conservation areas, running from the historic town centre out to the surrounding ironstone villages. The town centre conservation area is on the Heritage at Risk register, which is worth understanding rather than glossing over. It means the character of the area is considered to be under threat, and the practical consequence is that the council is likely to look harder at applications there, not less hard. An at risk designation is not a relaxation.
In the villages the designations protect some genuinely important things. The Earls Barton conservation area exists in large part to protect the setting of the Anglo-Saxon tower at All Saints Church, which dates from around 970 and is Grade I. Setting matters as much as fabric in a case like that, so work on nearby properties can be assessed on how it affects a view rather than on its own merits alone.
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. There is also the larger home extension route, allowing up to eight metres on a detached house or six on any other by prior approval, with neighbours notified and an answer in about six weeks.
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.
North Northamptonshire is unitary, so the council that decides your planning application is also the highway authority. A skip standing on a public road in Wellingborough is licensed by that same council, applied for by the skip company rather than by you or by us, and it needs to be in before the skip is due.
In the lower parts of the town an open excavation can take water even in an ordinary week, and that changes how a job runs rather than just how it is designed. Trenches may need pumping, concrete may need placing sooner after the dig than the programme would prefer, and there are weeks in the winter when the honest answer is that the ground is not fit to work. We would rather tell you that than pour into water and hope.
On the modern 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 Burton Latimer, Kettering, and Northampton.
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.
