What the houses are like

Milton Keynes is not an old town and the housing reflects that. The first estates went up from 1968, starting with the Lakes Estate, and the bulk of the city was built out through the seventies, eighties and nineties. Cavity walls, concrete tiles and trussed roofs are the norm, with a good deal of applied timber boarding on the earlier estates, left over from the days when the plan was to build them in lightweight timber frame.

Planning authority: Milton Keynes City Council

Finished media wall with a fitted electric fire, slatted panels and lit recesses

What that tends to mean for an extension

Modern cavity construction is generally straightforward to extend and to open up. Trussed roofs are the thing to watch, because the trusses work together as one structure and cannot simply be cut to make room for something. Where a design affects the roof, that normally needs designing properly rather than improvising on site.

The other local factor is the estate layout. Many houses sit on Radburn style layouts with garages in a separate block or set well back, and rear gardens that back onto footpaths rather than other gardens. Access for a mini digger and a grab lorry is one of the first things we look at, because where plant cannot reach the back of the house the groundworks approach and cost can change.

Milton Keynes Village, Middleton and the older core

Our own base is in Middleton, next to Milton Keynes Village, so this is the part of the city we know best. The village sits inside one of the borough conservation areas and has a very different character to the estates built around it: older stone and brick cottages, the church, and a street pattern that predates the new city by several centuries. Middleton and Monkston next door are largely nineties and two thousands housing, so the two sit side by side and behave completely differently on site.

The same contrast turns up at Woughton on the Green, Woolstone, Simpson and Great Linford, where a historic core sits inside a modern grid square. Work on the older buildings usually calls for matched materials and, in a conservation area, a closer look at anything visible from the street. Wolverton, with its Victorian railway terraces, is different again and has a page of its own.

Planning in the borough

Milton Keynes City Council is the planning authority for the whole borough, including the older towns and villages the new city was built around. There are 27 conservation areas, covering the historic settlements rather than the new city itself. A house on a nineties estate at Shenley Brook End and a house on the High Street in Stony Stratford are therefore working to quite different constraints.

Many domestic extensions here fall within permitted development, though that depends entirely on the property, what has been built before and whether any rights have been removed. Building Regulations approval is a separate matter and applies to the building work itself. We can flag the likely requirements early and advise when confirmation should be obtained from the council or an appropriate professional.