A west London family replaced an aging hedge with a higher boundary fence to keep their garden safe — and discovered that the rules for flats are quite different from the rules for houses.
Our client lives in a flatted property in a long-established west London conservation area. Their existing boundary — a tired stretch of planting along the front of the garden — had become unfit for purpose. Items were being thrown into the garden from the street. The hedge offered neither security nor a real visual barrier, and with young children using the garden, the family decided to take action.
They removed the planting and put up a higher, well-built timber fence using high-quality materials. From their point of view this was a sensible domestic improvement — the kind of thing thousands of London households do every year without thinking twice. The trouble started when the council got in touch.
Many homeowners assume that boundary treatments are largely covered by permitted development — and for ordinary houses, that's broadly right. The General Permitted Development Order tolerates fences and walls up to one metre next to a highway, and up to two metres elsewhere, on a single dwellinghouse.
But the property in this case isn't a single dwellinghouse. It's flatted accommodation, which falls within Class C3 use but doesn't carry the same permitted development rights as a house. For flats, almost any external alteration — including a new boundary treatment — needs express planning permission. The fence had crossed a threshold the family were unaware of.
Conservation area cases tend to land or fall on whether the proposal feels right for its setting. In the proposal’s favour, the new fence was carefully built, in natural materials, sympathetic in tone to the surrounding street, and replaced a boundary that had reached the end of its serviceable life. None of that would carry weight, however, unless the application engaged properly with the conservation area policies and explained why the new boundary treatment respected local character.
We also took a view on the wider site. The shed and garden works hadn't been flagged by the council, but enforcement teams frequently revisit outstanding matters. Our advice to the client was to think about regularising those elements at the same time, even though the immediate scope of work was just the fence.
Our planning statement leans into the practical justification for the new boundary treatment — security, the safety of children using the garden, prevention of antisocial behaviour from the street — and ties each of those points back to the relevant Local Plan policies on residential amenity and design. We also evidence why the materials and form of the new fence are appropriate to the conservation area: natural, well-detailed, in keeping with the surrounding boundary treatments along the street.
Alongside the planning statement, the application includes a heritage statement specifically addressing the conservation area context, full existing and proposed elevations and block plans, and a complete set of supporting drawings.
Alongside the planning statement, we prepared and submitted a full set of scaled architectural drawings — site location plan, block plan, and existing and proposed elevations and floor plans where relevant — giving the case officer a clear, accurate and measurable picture of the development to assess against policy.
If you live in a flat — even if it looks for all the world like a house — the permitted development rules you might have read about don't apply. Any works to the building or the garden should be checked against the planning position before they begin.
Boundary treatments are one of the easiest things to get wrong: the rules are not intuitive, they vary between houses and flats, and conservation areas restrict the flexibility homeowners often assume they have. If you've been contacted by your council about a fence, wall or gate, the first conversation with us is free.
A Chartered Town Planner will set out the options available to you, at no cost.