Heritage Architect in Home Counties

The Home Counties cover a wide range of vernacular traditions rather than one shared style. Kent's oast houses and weatherboarded barns, the flint-and-brick cottages of Sussex, Essex's timber-framed and pargeted farmhouses, and the Chiltern beech-woodland vernacular of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire are all genuinely different building traditions, sharing only the fact that each county's listed buildings are decided by that county's own district, borough or unitary councils rather than by any single Home Counties authority.

The High Weald — the wooded, historic landscape straddling the Kent, Sussex and Surrey borders — is a National Landscape (the status formerly called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) with its own character guidance on materials, roofscapes and setting, used alongside the local planning authority's own conservation area appraisals wherever a site falls within its boundary.

Old Posingford Farmhouse, the practice's published Home Counties case study, sits in this High Weald landscape: a Grade II farmhouse in Hartfield, East Sussex, with a nineteenth-century brick barn beside it, built from the bricks of an earlier building. The work there is a repair and adaptation of the curtilage-listed barn and garage — reading the fabric wall by wall to establish what survives from which period, and proposing the barn's next use within its existing walls rather than through extension. The application is prepared but not yet decided, and the page states that plainly rather than implying a consent that has not been granted.

The recurring theme across the Home Counties, more than in almost any other region the practice works in, is how much a single building's construction can vary within a few miles: a brick farmhouse, a timber-framed barn built from salvaged older brick, and a flint cottage can all sit on the same lane, each needing a different reading before anyone proposes a change to it.

Curtilage listing — where a structure counts as listed because it stands within the grounds of a principal listed building, even though it is not named on the list entry itself, as with the barn at Old Posingford — is a question that comes up often in this region's farmyards and outbuildings, and it is not always obvious from a site visit alone. Establishing whether a barn, stable or garage is curtilage listed, and therefore needs consent in its own right, is frequently the first practical question a Home Counties appraisal has to answer.

The seven counties in this group also differ in how tightly their green belt land constrains change: parts of Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Essex sit within the Metropolitan Green Belt around London, where planning policy on new development is markedly stricter than in the open countryside further out, whatever a building's listed status. A Home Counties appraisal checks green belt status alongside listing and conservation area status, since all three can independently affect what a proposal is allowed to do.

• the relevant district, borough or unitary council for each site (one per project) ↗
• the High Weald National Landscape team, for sites within its boundary ↗
• Historic England ↗

• Old Posingford Farmhouse — Grade II · High Weald, East Sussex
  Grade II farmhouse and curtilage-listed barn in the High Weald, East Sussex — application prepared.

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