Renovations in Highgate

Highgate sits on high ground and that fact reaches into almost every renovation here. Houses around the Village and the streets falling away towards Waterlow Park and the cemetery are exposed to weather at their upper storeys, plots step down rather than running level, and gardens are held up by old brick retaining walls that were never designed for what is now behind them. The building stock is largely period, generously built and worth restoring properly. What decides the programme in N6 is usually the roof, the ground, and whether a lorry can get anywhere near the front of the house.

Roofs First on Exposed Period Houses

On a three storey house in an exposed position, the roof is where a renovation should start. Slate patched for decades, valley gutters lined too long ago, parapet copings letting water into the wall head and rainwater goods running behind render are the defects that quietly ruin work carried out below them. Stripping and recovering a roof, renewing flashings and putting the drainage right first means the plaster, joinery and decoration that follow are not being installed into a building still taking water. Chimney stacks in these positions take a beating as well, and repointing them while the scaffold is already standing avoids a second visit later on.

Loft conversions in these houses are often very good ones, because the roofs are steep and the plan is generous. Feasibility is decided by measurement rather than optimism: the height from the top of the existing ceiling joists to the underside of the ridge, where a stair can land without wrecking the floor below, and how a dormer sits on a roof seen from the street and from the parkland. New floor joists are designed to span between load bearing walls rather than resting on the old ceiling joists, and the engineer specifies the sizes.

Sloping Ground, Retaining Walls and Drainage

Extending on a plot that falls away is a groundworks exercise before it is a building one. Foundations step down the slope, excavation depths change across the footprint, and the engineer determines what is required from what the trial holes show rather than from a standard detail. Old garden retaining walls often turn out to be single skin brick with no drainage behind them, which is fine until you load the ground above or excavate in front. Where a new structure retains ground, it is designed as a retaining structure and built to that design.

Water moves downhill and so does everyone else's. Surface run-off from higher ground, collapsed drainage runs and soakaways that stopped working years ago all show up as damp at the bottom of a sloping plot. It is worth resolving the drainage while the ground is open, because doing it afterwards means digging the same trenches twice. Access is the other constraint on the steep, narrow streets near the Village, where large vehicles cannot turn, scaffold needs stepped bases and deliveries are planned in sizes that will actually arrive. Neighbours are given warning before any delivery that will block a narrow street for a while.

Where most Highgate projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Highgate, everything we cover across Camden, renovations in Camden Town, renovations in Hampstead and full house renovation cost.