Heritage Statement and listed building consent for nine apartments above a Grade II listed Regency terrace.

A stalled application and the right document for the question.

The original proposal was for nine apartments in the upper floors of the terrace, together with the demolition of the former stable building at the rear and a new courtyard block of fifteen more. By the autumn of 2023 it had been undetermined for eighteen months. The conservation officer had advised that the heritage information was piecemeal, did not give a reliable understanding of the site, and could become a reason for refusal.

The officer had asked for a standing building survey or similar, which the project team took to mean a full building record. Our advice was that the officer was not asking for a record of the building but for an explanation of its morphology: which parts are of which date, and what that means for their significance. That is a different document, and a considerably less expensive one. We produced a Heritage Statement with phased plans, roof plan and elevations, and a set of fabric significance drawings.

Directories, aerial photographs and a stable that was never theirs.

The research drew on the 1845 town plan and successive Ordnance Survey editions, aerial photographs from 1920 to 1951, trade directories from 1844 to 1928, Land Registry title documents and a visit to the Historic England Archive in Swindon.

The archive produced photographs taken in 1984, immediately before Nos. 102 and 104 were taken down. The River Chelt runs in a culvert beneath the site, and subsidence had led to both houses being demolished and rebuilt that year with a replica stone front over a modern structure. Two thirds of the listed terrace is therefore a reconstruction, and No. 106 is the only part with original masonry, behind a shopfront of 1954 installed for a piano dealer.

The building at the rear had been treated as a curtilage listed stable belonging to the terrace. The directories and title documents told a different story. It was a separate livery stable, recorded in other hands in 1844 and for decades afterwards. Its yard was roofed over around 1930, when the chemists at No. 102 took it on to manufacture toilet preparations, and it was only joined to No. 106 in 1961. Its historic link to the listed building is slight and, after successive alteration, its significance is low.

Assessment accepted, and a lighter scheme granted.

The conservation officer’s response in January 2024 was that the understanding of significance in the amended Heritage Statement was more robust, that it clarified the relationship between the terrace and the stable block, and, in the officer’s words, ‘The assessment in the Heritage Statement is accepted.’

The larger scheme was withdrawn in April 2024 for reasons that were not about heritage significance: the culvert beneath the site and the scale of the proposed rear block. The applicant returned with a phased approach. The first phase kept the stable building, separated it from No. 106 as an independent commercial unit, converted the upper floors of the terrace to nine apartments and remodelled the 1984 rear roof, with solar panels on its rear slope. We updated the Heritage Statement to assess the scheme as revised, working with Inchbald Day Planning and Development and coombes:everitt architects.

Planning permission (24/00942/FUL) and listed building consent (24/00942/LBC) were validated on 4 June 2024 and granted on 12 July 2024, less than six weeks later. The officer’s report drew on the conservation officer’s earlier comments, including that the solar panels were acceptable because they sit on a modern roof, hidden within the enclosed courtyard.