Builder in London

Yes. The photographs on this page are London jobs: a rear extension and loft conversion finished in render, a re-roof in clay plain tiles with lead valleys and a new flat roof, a bathroom, a staircase from first fix to a finished runner, and kitchens. Ring Bes and he will talk you through any of them. His credentials are on public registers, so you can check those before you call.

Your borough. There are thirty-two London boroughs plus the City of London Corporation, thirty-three planning authorities in all, and each has its own local plan, its own conservation areas and its own list of what a valid application has to include. The Mayor's London Plan sits above them and sets strategic policy, but the Mayor only gets involved in applications of potential strategic importance, which start at scales like a hundred and fifty homes or buildings above thirty metres. Nothing about a single house extension, loft or basement reaches him. Tell us the borough and we will tell you what you are dealing with.

Because a great deal of London sits on shrinkable clay, which swells and shrinks with moisture, and mature trees near the line of a new foundation make it worse by drawing water out of the ground. Luton sits on chalk, which generally does not behave that way. Approved Document A puts the minimum depth in shrinkable clay at 0.75 metres on low shrinkage, 0.9 metres on medium and 1.0 metres on high, and says plainly that those depths may need to be increased where there are trees nearby. The commonly repeated 0.9 metres is the medium figure, not a London default. It is one of the reasons the same extension costs more here, and it is a survey question rather than a guess.

Statistically, yes. The 2021 Census put 54.0 per cent of London households in a flat, maisonette or apartment against 22.2 per cent for England, and only 6.1 per cent in a detached house. It matters because permitted development rights under Part 1 of the Order apply to houses and not to flats or maisonettes, so a great deal of what a homeowner reads online about extending without permission simply does not apply to a London flat. Tell us which you have in the first message and it saves a wasted conversation.

On a terrace or a semi, very probably, and often two notices rather than one. Cutting into a party wall to take the bearing of a beam is the example the government's own guidance gives, and that is exactly what a rear extension or a loft conversion steel does: section 3 of the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, at least two months' notice. Separately, excavating within three metres of a neighbour's building and deeper than their foundations is section 6, at least one month's notice, and on London clay your foundations very often will be deeper. Two clocks, both of which belong in the programme on day one rather than being remembered later.

The planning fee is set nationally rather than by your borough. From 1 April 2026 a householder application in England is 548 pounds, and prior approval for a larger home extension or an additional storey is 249 pounds. That is the council's fee, not ours, and it sits alongside building control, any structural engineer's fees and any party wall surveyor. We itemise all of it rather than folding it into a single number, so you can see what is ours and what is not.

No, and this is worth being blunt about because it is the obvious thing to assume. Bes is a Registered Building Inspector at Class 2, registered with the Building Safety Regulator, which has been a legal requirement for anyone doing building control work in England since 6 April 2024. The register is public and you can look him up. What that does not allow is building control on his own company's work. An inspector is not permitted to act where his company has a professional or financial interest, which includes anything BXC designed or built. Your building control comes from the council or from a building control approver you appoint, exactly as it would with any other builder. The value to you is the other way round: the man running your job has been assessed on the Building Regulations from the inspector's side of the table, so the details that normally get picked up at inspection tend to be right first time.

We are not going to promise that. A contractor coming in from outside London does not automatically come in cheaper, because travel, parking, permits, waste and sometimes accommodation all land somewhere in the price. What we will do is itemise them so you can see them rather than have them buried in a single figure, which also means you can compare our quote fairly against a local one.

Send the borough, the postcode, a couple of photographs and a sentence about what you want. Bes will tell you on the phone whether it is a job we should be quoting, before anybody spends a morning travelling.

Yes. BXC Developments is based at 12 Jackson Road, Barking, and takes extensions, loft conversions, roofing, brickwork and renovations in Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Redbridge and Newham. Site visits and written itemised quotes are free, and the London jobs we have photographed are shown on this page.

No. Site visits and written itemised quotes are free across Barking, Dagenham and the rest of east London. We do not publish fixed prices for building work, because no two houses are the same, so you get a price for your own property once we have seen it.