Building work in Catford: area guide

This is our area guide to building work in Catford (SE6, Lewisham): the housing, the council rules that apply (Lewisham Council for planning) and every service we offer here. For whole-house refurbishment go to Home renovation in Catford.

On VOA figures, most Catford addresses are flats, where the freeholder's licence comes before any wall is touched. Where a family has bought a whole Edwardian terrace, it usually has good bones and a rear layout that stopped making sense fifty years ago. The houses in the streets around Mountsfield Park and down towards Ladywell Fields are wide by London standards, with square bays, decent halls and a scullery arrangement at the back nobody has needed since. Opening that up is an open-plan conversion job and building behind it is a house extension. We cover Catford from across south London rather than from a base here.

Catford counts roughly 7,650 homes for Council Tax; 61% are older than 1919, 4% interwar and 33% post-war, with 66% flats and 34% houses. VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for Catford East & Mountsfield Park and Catford Bridge. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Opening an Edwardian Catford ground floor is a spine wall question first

The typical Catford ground floor was built as four compartments: front room, rear room, a hall running past both and a narrow kitchen tacked on behind. Connecting them means the spine wall, which carries floor joists and often a stack, and the rear wall, which carries the roof of the back addition. Both are load-bearing wall removal, and neither comes out on judgement. We appoint a structural engineer to assess what each wall supports and design the steel, and our part is the building: propping on spread sole plates, staged demolition, exact bearings and clean reinstatement.

What bites on these houses is earlier work. A previous owner took the kitchen wall out with a lintel that never bore properly, a stack was removed upstairs and left standing on nothing but a hope, which makes it a chimney breast removal correction before anything new, or joists were cut through for a soil pipe. None of that shows on a floorplan. Our survey lifts boards, opens ceilings where we can and photographs what is found, so the engineer designs around the house that exists, and your price reflects the same reality.

Extending at the rear in SE6 starts with the planning history and the drain

A single storey rear addition on a terraced or semi-detached Catford house commonly falls within permitted development at three metres, with a larger depth through the prior approval route where the council consults your neighbours first. That is the starting point, not the answer: earlier additions or an unusual boundary position can each use up or remove the allowance, a designated conservation area rules out the deeper prior approval route, an Article 4 direction can remove the rest, and a flat has no such rights. We check the planning history for your address and put the house extension enquiry to Lewisham Council rather than reading limits off a website.

The building side then runs on inspections. Building control wants to see the open trench before concrete, the damp proof course and structure as they go in, the insulation and the drainage, and one point catches people out repeatedly in these streets: the existing soil run and inspection chamber usually sit right where the new floor is going. Where new structure sits over a public sewer, a build over agreement with the water authority is required and takes time to obtain. We identify that at survey, not at first fix, and book the inspections rather than working around them.

Where to go next for work in Catford: kitchen renovation in Catford, house extensions in Catford, the Lewisham area guide, building work in Forest Hill, building work in Deptford and Renovations That Add Value.