Daylight and sunlight report in Lambeth

Why a flat-heavy borough makes this harder

Only 24.8 per cent of Lambeth households live in a house or bungalow. Most of the rest live in flats, and a flat usually has windows that look straight across a rear garden or a lightwell towards the back of a neighbouring block. A modest two-storey rear extension on a Victorian terrace can face a dozen windows, not the two or three you would expect in a street of detached houses.

Owner-occupation is low as well, at 33 per cent of households, so many of the people who receive a neighbour consultation letter are tenants who read it closely. Officers know this. A report that names each affected window and room, rather than summarising the street, answers the objections before they are written.

Gardens matter too. The Greater London Authority's land-use survey put domestic gardens at 26 per cent of the borough's land, and the overshadowing test for those gardens is part of the same report. A tall boundary wall or a garden room along the fence line shows up there first.

Heritage and Article 4 rules that shape the design

The council publishes 64 conservation areas, and Historic England lists 953 buildings inside the boundary. Where a house is in one of those areas, officers often steer an extension towards a lower, smaller form. A lower form is kinder to neighbours' light, so the heritage advice and the daylight result tend to point the same way.

Lambeth also holds 12 Article 4 directions, covering 223 separate mapped areas. Inside them, work that would otherwise be permitted development needs a full application, and a full application is where the validation list bites. Our free check looks at the direction before it looks at the light.

The council's Design Guide guidance for building alterations, extensions and retrofit is the reference officers use for the shape of the extension itself. We read the published Lambeth Design Guide SPD Part 4: Building Alterations, Extensions and Retrofit alongside the report so that the massing we test is a form the council is prepared to consider.

What the planning record says about Lambeth householders

In the latest published year the council decided 595 householder applications and granted 83.4 per cent of them, with 93.4 per cent decided within eight weeks or an agreed extension. Those are fair odds for a well-prepared application, and the report is one of the things that makes an application well prepared.

Look at the larger side of the picture too. Across all application types the council issued 1,793 decisions. Smaller schemes of up to nine homes, the minor class, were granted at 79.9 per cent. If your project is a small block or a conversion into several flats, our planning consultant service in Lambeth can carry the wider argument while we supply the light evidence.

How our daylight and sunlight report works

We start with a measured survey of your property and photographs of the neighbours' elevations. Window positions, sill heights and the position of any obstruction go into a three-dimensional model of the existing street. We then add the proposal and run the BRE tests before and after: vertical sky component at the window face, the daylight distribution inside the room, annual probable sunlight hours for windows that face within the orientation limit, and overshadowing of gardens on the spring equinox.

The written report names every window, gives the figures, and explains in plain English where the proposal falls outside the guideline values and why that may still be acceptable in this part of the borough. The guide is advisory, and London policy asks officers to apply it with flexibility on denser sites. A second technologist who did not build the model checks the geometry and results before we issue anything.

When the figures show a problem, we show the options: a lower eaves line, a stepped roof, a narrower depth, a different window position. Testing those on the model costs far less than redesigning after an objection.

Fees and next step

The report has no list price, because the work depends on how many neighbouring windows sit within range and how complex the site is. We give a fixed fee after the free constraints check, and it covers the survey data, the model, the tests and the written report.

Send us the address and a sketch. We will tell you whether Lambeth's Local List item applies, whether a simple geometric test is enough, or whether you need the full set. See the service overview for the method, or the architectural drawings page for Lambeth for everything else we draw in the borough. Neighbouring boroughs have their own wording: Southwark and Merton differ in what they ask for.