Building work in Stratford: area guide

This is our area guide to building work in Stratford (E15, E20, Newham): the housing, the council rules that apply (Newham Council for planning) and every service we offer here. For whole-house refurbishment go to Home renovation in Stratford.

Walk out of Stratford station in any direction and most of what you can see was built after 2005. The apartment buildings around Westfield, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the ArcelorMittal Orbit are framed structures with fixed risers, mechanical ventilation and building-wide systems, so work inside one is a controlled fit-out rather than a building job. Older terraced streets sit a little further out and behave completely differently. GS Renovation works on both, and on an E15 apartment the planning starts with access, consents and services long before anyone picks a worktop.

Stratford has around 17,020 homes on the Council Tax list: 71% post-war, 1% interwar and 27% predate 1919, with 71% flats and 29% houses. VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for Stratford East, Stratford Central, West Ham & Stratford Park and Carpenters Estate & Stratford New Town. Counts rounded by the VOA.

In apartments around the Olympic Park, the riser decides the room

Newer blocks are engineered as complete systems, and that is the part owners underestimate. Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery serves the flat through ducts sized at design stage, so a new cooker hood cannot simply be connected into it or blanked off without upsetting the balance of the whole unit. Where the building runs communal heating, the heat interface unit and its pipework belong to a system serving other homes and are not repositioned casually. Sprinkler heads and detectors are tied into a building-wide arrangement, and any change to them needs formal approval, not a site decision.

Wet rooms carry the highest consequence. Your bathroom probably sits above another household's ceiling, so in a bathroom renovation here tanking to walls and floor, correct falls and a sound substrate are the whole job, and tiling is just what you see afterwards. Drainage falls back to the stack are fixed, which sets the realistic zone for any layout change. We survey the existing runs, the riser positions and the ventilation arrangement first, then design within them, so the scheme you approve is one the building will actually allow, rather than one redrawn after the managing agent has read it.

Getting a fit-out up a tower sets the programme

Logistics dominate the programme in a tall block. The service lift has to be booked, it has load and length limits, and full sheets of plasterboard or a three metre worktop may simply not fit in it, which changes what a kitchen renovation orders and how it is jointed. Deliveries land at a loading bay with a short window, everything is moved on trolleys under protection, and waste comes back down the same route bagged rather than loose. None of this is difficult, but it is slower than a house, and a programme that ignores it will be wrong from the first week.

Access control adds its own rhythm. Concierge sign-in, fobs, agreed working hours and protected corridors are arranged before the start rather than negotiated on the morning. We provide the insurance certificates and method information the management company requires up front, and one person holds every thread, including the relationship with the building team. GS Renovation is registered in England under company number 14611254 and gives a five year guarantee on installations we carry out. That single point of contact matters most when a lift booking moves at short notice and somebody has to replan the week without it landing on you.

Where to go next for work in Stratford: kitchen renovation in Stratford, house extensions in Stratford, the Newham area guide, building work in Forest Gate, building work in Bow and Renovation Order of Works.