Listed building consent and heritage statement for a rear extension to a Grade II timber framed hall.

Reading the frame before designing the extension.

A list entry describes a building. It does not tell you which parts of it are original, which have been altered, or which walls can take an opening without damaging anything that matters. At Braham Hall those questions had to be answered before the scheme could be justified.

Our involvement began with a site inspection in October 2025, followed by a Heritage Statement that went well beyond a desk exercise. It incorporated a fabric assessment and an analysis of the timber frame: establishing the phasing of the building, distinguishing original studs and rails from later replacement, and recording the empty mortices in the surviving midrail where framing had been lost.

That analysis did more than support the application. It identified where change could be absorbed without harm, and where it could not, which is what made the later negotiation productive rather than adversarial.

Revision, resubmission and a scheme that moved.

Two earlier applications for the house, made before we were appointed, had been refused in September 2025. The council’s heritage officer had found the significance of the building difficult to establish from the information submitted, and the refusal recorded that the harm identified had not been clearly and convincingly justified. Our assessment was commissioned to supply that understanding. On resubmission the conservation officer raised further points, and the proposals were amended in response, working with Michael Lewis of Bailey Lewis, the project architect.

The Heritage Statement was then updated so that the assessment described the scheme as revised rather than the drawings it had superseded. Applications regularly stall at exactly this point, because the heritage document describes a building operation that has since changed shape and the officer is left to reconcile two accounts of the same proposal.

Consents granted, and conditions that can be answered.

Planning permission (DC/26/01713) and listed building consent (DC/26/01714) were both granted on 14 July 2026.

The conditions are the ones a building of this age should attract. Materials, external windows and doors at 1:10 and 1:2, eaves and abutment sections, internal doors and external vents are all to be approved before the relevant works begin, and adjacent fabric made good in matching materials, forms and finishes. The council also requires lost timber framing to be accurately reinstated by reusing the mortices in the surviving midrail, with oak studs matching the adjacent framing. That is a condition answerable only because the frame had already been recorded.

Both the Heritage Statement and the fabric assessment are named among the approved documents on the decision notices.

The barns, and the question of curtilage.

We were also instructed on the farm buildings east of the Hall, where the owners proposed to convert the redundant timber framed threshing barn and its yard to a wedding venue. The council’s pre-application advice had treated the barns as listed by virtue of standing within the curtilage of the Hall, which would have brought every alteration to them under listed building control.

The tithe map of 1837 answered the point. It shows the barn and yard as one plot and the house and garden as another. Our Heritage Statement set out that evidence, and the council’s Senior Heritage Officer accepted that the buildings were unlikely to have been within the same curtilage at the date of listing.

Planning permission for the wedding venue (DC/25/04586) was granted on 24 February 2026, following amendments sought by the heritage officer. The council judged that the benefit of bringing the buildings back into use outweighed the limited harm it identified.