Architectural drawings in Bromley

The local plan and what replaces a householder guide

Bromley's development plan is the Bromley Local Plan, adopted in 2,019. It has no adopted householder, roof or basement guidance document. The nearest thing to design guidance on its adopted list is the Urban Design Guide SPD.

In practice that means the policies themselves carry the weight, and officers judge each scheme on its merits against them. For an extension that tends to come down to bulk, the gap kept to the boundary, and the effect on neighbours. We draw the relationship to both side boundaries and the neighbouring windows so the case officer does not have to infer it.

If you want the council's own words, its online register lets you search a street for earlier decisions. A refused extension two doors away is useful to know about before the drawings are finished.

How Bromley has treated recent applications

In the latest twelve months of published figures Bromley decided 1,609 householder applications and granted 78.6 per cent of them. About 89.1 per cent were decided inside eight weeks or an agreed extension. These are borough-wide figures from the past, and they do not predict the outcome for a particular house.

Two other numbers are worth knowing. Of 502 householder appeals decided, 37.6 per cent went the applicant's way, so a refusal is not always the end. And for the large rear extension prior approval route, the council granted 3 and refused 15.

That second pair is the reason we do not treat prior approval as a shortcut here. The council weighs the effect on neighbours, including any objections, so the drawings need to answer those points in advance. Our prior approval drawings in Bromley are built around that point.

Heritage in the borough

Historic England lists 412 entries inside the borough boundary: 8 at Grade I, 23 at Grade II* and 380 at Grade II. Alongside them sit 9 scheduled monuments and 6 registered parks and gardens.

The national Heritage at Risk Register names 25 entries here. If your house is listed, most alterations need separate listed building consent. If it stands in the setting of a listed building, the design needs a heritage-led approach. Tell us on the first call and we will say what that involves.

Many Bromley homes are not listed but sit in a conservation area, where roof and frontage changes get closer scrutiny. Our loft conversion drawings in Bromley show roof form and materials with that scrutiny in mind.

Money, gardens and the levy

A terraced house in Bromley averages £483,699 in the latest Land Registry index, and a semi-detached £652,925. Domestic gardens make up 23.4 per cent of the borough's land, which is a lot of room to extend into.

Bromley sits in band 2 of the Mayor of London's levy, at £72.73 per square metre for permissions granted this year. The borough also publishes its own schedule, the Bromley Community Infrastructure Levy charging schedule. Householder extensions under the usual size threshold are normally exempt, and we flag any liability in our hand-over notes.

The council had 512 certificates of lawful use or development recorded in the national statistics, a sign of how many owners use that route. A Lawful Development Certificate in Bromley from £645 is the written proof.

Services we draw for Bromley

A full application starts with planning drawings in Bromley, and a ground-floor project usually adds rear extension drawings in Bromley. Once you have a decision, building regulations drawings in Bromley turn the design into a buildable set.

Bromley borders several other places. If your house is near the edge, our pages for Croydon, Greenwich and Lewisham cover the neighbouring councils' rules.