Building work in Shoreditch: area guide

This is our area guide to building work in Shoreditch (E2, EC2A, E1, Hackney and Tower Hamlets): the housing, the council rules that apply (Hackney Council or Tower Hamlets Council for planning) and every service we offer here. For whole-house refurbishment go to Home renovation in Shoreditch.

Shoreditch work happens inside buildings that were never houses. The streets running back from Shoreditch High Street towards Hoxton and Old Street hold former furniture workshops, printworks and warehouses shelled out and sold as flats, but most homes here are in post-war estates and newer blocks. Almost all of it is leasehold, much of it framed in concrete, and run by a managing agent with rules about noise, lifts and waste, so the first question is whether a wall is partition or frame, and the second is the licence. We plan around those rules instead of arguing with them. Our founder Abdelaaziz Saaid has 30+ years on the tools.

Shoreditch has about 11,700 homes on the Council Tax list: 24% pre-1919, 4% interwar and 72% post-war, with flats making up 94% and houses 6%. VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for Shoreditch, Columbia Road and Brick Lane North. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Partition or frame: what a warehouse conversion will and will not let you move

In a converted warehouse the building is held up by a frame, so the walls dividing your rooms are usually carrying nothing but themselves. Stud partitions come out easily, which makes most layouts an open-plan conversion job rather than a structural one, a kitchen can travel across the plan, and a mezzanine can be reworked where the head height allows. What stays put is the frame: columns, downstand beams, bracing and the core wrapped around the stair and lift. So do the risers, which carry soil, water and ventilation for every flat in the stack. We survey all of that before a layout is agreed, because a design that assumes a column will vanish is a design that gets redrawn.

Where an opening through something structural is genuinely wanted, or a new floor level is being formed, the job becomes structural alterations: a structural engineer is appointed to design it and we build to that design, never producing the calculations ourselves. Loadings in these buildings are often generous, because the floors were sized for machinery and stacked stock, but generous is not the same as measured. Concrete frames need scanning before anything is drilled so reinforcement is not cut through, and steel frames need connections made exactly as they are detailed. We coordinate building control too, from the application through to the inspections on site.

Leasehold consent comes first: the practicalities of an E2 site

Nearly every flat between Hoxton Square and the Columbia Road Flower Market end of E2 is leasehold, and the lease will normally demand the freeholder's written licence to alter before anything structural, anything affecting the demise, or a bathroom renovation that moves a soil connection is touched. That process runs alongside building control rather than replacing it, and it needs starting early because agents work to their own timescales. We supply the method statements, insurance evidence and programme a managing agent usually asks for. Permitted development rights do not apply to flats at all, so any change to the outside of the building is a planning question for Hackney Council, or Tower Hamlets Council on its side of the boundary, not something assumed from what a neighbouring house has done.

Logistics here are a discipline of their own. Deliveries arrive on streets that are busy from mid morning, loading bays are shared with bars and shops, and most blocks restrict working hours and insist that materials and waste move by service lift rather than through the main entrance. Protection to communal flooring and lift cars is expected and allowed for in the programme. Where a skip cannot legally stand, we bag waste and book collections at fixed times. One person keeps the agent, the residents below and you hearing the same version of the schedule.

Where to go next for work in Shoreditch: kitchen renovation in Shoreditch, house extensions in Shoreditch, the Hackney area guide, building work in Old Street, building work in Hoxton and Renovation Budget & Contingency.