Renovations in Kentish Town

A good number of renovations in Kentish Town begin by undoing somebody else's. The NW5 terraces have been altered repeatedly since the 1970s, and when the plaster comes off it is common to find a knock-through sitting on a beam nobody designed, a chimney breast taken out at ground level with the stack above resting on brackets, or joists notched half through for a pipe run. None of that stops a project. It does mean the survey matters more than the mood board, and that the first task on a house here is finding out what is actually holding it up.

Putting Earlier Alterations Right

The pattern repeats across the neighbourhood. Openings were formed between reception rooms without padstones, so beam ends have been crushing brickwork for thirty years. Breasts were taken out floor by floor with nothing picking up the stack. Wall plates were cut away for a boiler flue. Sometimes the work is perfectly sound and simply undocumented. Either way it needs assessing before new work is built on top of it, and that assessment is a structural engineer's job rather than a builder's opinion. We arrange the survey and price any remedial work openly once the design comes back.

Remedial support is usually straightforward once designed. A proper padstone under a bearing, a replacement beam sized for the load, or a steel to carry a stack that has been left hanging. Where past alterations were never notified, Camden Council can consider a regularisation application, which brings unauthorised work into the building control system retrospectively and is worth doing well before you sell. We coordinate that application and the inspections that go with it, and nothing gets covered up until the inspector has seen it. Where an opening turns out to have been formed correctly but never recorded, the remedy is paperwork rather than brickwork.

The Standard NW5 Terrace

Underneath the alterations, most of these houses are the same animal. Two rooms deep with a rear closet wing, solid nine inch brickwork, suspended timber floors over a ventilated void, lath and plaster to walls and ceilings, and a small garden behind. Renovating one properly means lifting floors to inspect and replace joist ends where damp has reached them, clearing airbricks rendered over or buried by raised ground levels outside, renewing electrics and plumbing while the fabric is open, and replastering in a way that suits solid walls rather than trapping moisture inside them.

Working here is a street problem as much as a building one. Parking around Kentish Town Road and the residential streets by Talacre Gardens is controlled, there is no rear access to most terraces, and everything from the first barrow of spoil to the last kitchen unit passes through the front door. Skip permits and bay suspensions are applied for in advance. Deliveries come in loads a small vehicle can bring, floors and the staircase are protected before work starts, and the frontage is swept at the end of each day.

Where most Kentish Town projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Kentish Town, everything we cover across Camden, renovations in Camden Town, renovations in Hampstead and how to plan a renovation.