Twenty minutes from Chatham along the A2. Windmill Hill villas, 1920s King's Farm, Riverview Park on the old airfield and the garden city homes at Springhead: very different houses, with very different rules for changing them.
Gravesend
Windmill Hill, Perry Street, Painters Ash and Christianfields sit on Thanet Formation sand. King's Farm, Riverview Park, Singlewell and Istead Rise are on chalk. Both are generally good ground for foundations, with one local catch.
Gravesend is named among the most important groups of dene holes in the country: old chalk shafts and workings that can sit under gardens unrecorded. A medieval dene hole was found at Northfleet in 2008 after ground probing on a housing site revealed voids. So it pays to look into the history of your plot before anyone digs, and if anything looks wrong in the trench, building control should see it before a drop of concrete goes in.
The housing runs from Rosherville New Town, laid out from 1830, through the 1920s King's Farm estate and Riverview Park, built on the former RAF Gravesend airfield, to Christianfields, rebuilt between 2007 and 2013, and the first Ebbsfleet garden city homes at Springhead.
Permissions
Gravesham Borough Council
Gravesend is in Gravesham, not Medway. Gravesham Borough Council decides planning applications, except in parts of Northfleet such as Springhead Park, where the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation is the planning authority. Building control is STG, the same partnership that serves Medway. Gravesham has 23 conservation areas, and Article 4 directions in Windmill Hill, Milton Place, Upper Windmill Street, Darnley Road, King Street, Pelham Road and The Avenue, Overcliffe, the Riverside and The Hill mean that on the front of a house, new windows, doors, porches, roof materials, rooflights, painting, render and boundary walls all need permission. Like-for-like repairs do not.
Services in Gravesend
Rear extensions on the King's Farm and Riverview Park houses, where most of the work sits out of sight of the street.
→Foundations dug with the town's dene hole history in mind, and any voids shown to building control before concrete.
→Like-for-like re-roofs in the Article 4 areas, where a change of roof material on the front needs permission.
→Replacement windows and doors made to match on Windmill Hill and in the other Article 4 streets.
→Rear dormer lofts that keep the street side unchanged.
→Boundary walls and brick repairs that match the original, kept within the Article 4 rules.
→Common projects
Gravesend is about twenty minutes from Chatham on the A2, one of the nearest towns outside Medway. Send us the details and we'll pass them on to builders who cover Gravesend and Northfleet.
Questions
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A rough idea and a postcode is enough. We'll pass it to local builders who cover Gravesend, and they'll contact you directly.