Building work in Golders Green: area guide

This is our area guide to building work in Golders Green (NW11, Barnet): the housing, the council rules that apply (Barnet Council for planning) and every service we offer here. For whole-house refurbishment go to Home renovation in Golders Green.

Edwardian builders in NW11 had more room and more money than their Victorian predecessors, and it shows. Houses off Golders Green Road tend to have wider frontages, deeper halls, heavier joinery, larger bay windows and more generous rear plots than a house a generation older. They are also large enough that many have been extended, divided or both, and on VOA figures most homes here are now flats, where freeholder consent and the shared stack decide the job. Where a design is required we appoint structural engineers, and we coordinate building control from application to completion certificate.

By the valuation list's count, Golders Green holds about 7,590 homes, 44% houses and 56% flats; by age, 47% were built before 1919, 26% between the wars and 27% since 1945. VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for Golders Green North and Golders Green South. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Doing justice to an Edwardian house before its rooms

The joinery is usually the first thing worth saving. Wide staircases with turned balusters, panelled doors, picture rails and window frames of slow-grown timber will outlast anything that would replace them, and repairing them is generally quicker and less disruptive than a swap. Coloured and leaded glass in a front door or stair window is repairable, and the tiled path and porch can be relaid rather than concreted over. Keeping these and modernising everything behind them is a home renovation job that still looks right in twenty years.

The awkward feature of a deep Edwardian plan is the middle, which can be dark all day. In the houses that remain whole, rooflights over a rear extension, a well-placed opening in a non-critical wall (a structural alteration job) and glazing at the back all help, as does not filling the side return so completely that the original rear windows lose their light. Heating a house this size needs the system sized to the actual heat loss rather than to the radiators already on the wall, a calculation worth doing before a boiler is chosen.

Hampstead Garden Suburb, divided houses and the freeholder

Parts of NW11 fall inside the Hampstead Garden Suburb conservation area, where external alterations are tightly controlled and many houses also come under the Suburb's own scheme of management, so consent from the trust is needed as well as from Barnet Council. On those streets a change to windows, a roof or a boundary that would be routine elsewhere starts with an application, and the design is settled before anything is ordered.

Away from the Suburb, many of the larger Edwardian houses have been divided into flats. In a flat the freeholder's licence comes first, the walls between flats may carry the floors above, and a bathroom renovation is planned around the shared stack and the ceiling of the flat below. Putting a divided house back together is a home renovation that can also need planning permission, because it changes the number of homes, so that is confirmed with Barnet Council before the strip-out.

Where to go next for work in Golders Green: house extensions in Golders Green, the Barnet area guide, building work in Finchley, building work in Hendon and Listed Building Renovation.