Builders in Walthamstow.

Walthamstow is our home patch and where most of our work happens. The housing stock is mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces — built between 1880 and 1910 to house workers in the furniture trade and the railway, with London stocks and red brick detailing, sash windows, and small front gardens behind low walls. Most streets in E17 still look broadly the way they did when they went up.

The conservation areas — Walthamstow Village, St Mary's, Hoe Street, Coppermill, Lloyd Park among them — cover a fair chunk of the postcode. If you're in one, almost any work to your front elevation, your sash windows, or your boundary wall is a planning matter. The detail of what's allowed and what isn't varies by area.

Outside the conservation areas, the rules are looser, but the housing stock is the same. Stock brick walls, lath-and-plaster ceilings, suspended timber floors, original cornices in most reception rooms if they haven't been ripped out. The classic E17 renovation problem is a Victorian terrace that was modernised badly in the 1970s — artex over the cornice, woodchip over the picture rail, a melamine kitchen against a wall that hasn't been replastered in fifty years.

Side returns and rear extensions are the dominant remodelling pattern. Most permitted development side returns work in E17 because the back gardens are long enough to handle the loss of width. Loft conversions are common too — most of the terraces have the headroom and the structure for one.