Builders and plumbers in Kentish Town, NW5

The same three-storey terrace on a Kentish Town street can be a family house, three leasehold flats or a shared house with several households. A freeholder can decide on the roof, the stacks and the rear wall. A leaseholder usually cannot, and needs a licence to alter for anything beyond decoration inside the demise. A landlord of a shared house may hold a licence whose conditions fix room sizes, fire precautions and amenities.

So the first questions we ask are about tenure. Who owns the freehold, what does the lease say about alterations, and is the property let as a house in multiple occupation? Camden’s guidance explains that a property occupied by three or more people forming two or more households, sharing amenities, needs an HMO licence. The answers decide who signs the scope and what the work must satisfy.

Terraced housing shares walls, and conversions share floors. GOV.UK explains that owners must tell their neighbours before building work on or near a shared boundary. A party wall can stand on the land of two or more owners, and a party structure can be a floor separating flats with different owners. Party wall agreements are separate from planning and Building Regulations. In a Kentish Town terrace this can include chimney-breast removals, steel beams bearing on the party wall, loft conversions, rear extensions and excavation near a neighbour.

Notices, responses and any surveyor’s award take time, and the work they cover should not start until the process allows it. We place the party-wall step on the programme and identify every adjoining owner, including the flat below or above. In a converted house, the adjoining owner may be in the same building.

Camden adopted the Kentish Town conservation area appraisal and management strategy in 2011, with supporting maps for designation dates, townscape, topography and character areas. A separate West Kentish Town conservation area statement was adopted in September 2005. The council’s heritage Article 4 register does not currently list a direction for either area. Other directions can exist, though, and the position must be confirmed for the property. Some NW5 streets sit outside both designations.

Where a designation applies, the council’s guidance is that alterations usually need planning permission and that a heritage statement must accompany the application. Where it does not, permitted development may cover more, subject to the building’s form and history. Because the boundaries follow streets rather than the postcode, the check is address-specific, and we make it before windows, roofs or front boundaries are specified.

Camden formally adopted the Kentish Town Neighbourhood Plan on 19 September 2016. The neighbourhood forum was redesignated from 4 March 2025. The plan sits within the development plan, so applications inside the neighbourhood area are assessed against its policies. The council’s page publishes the plan in four parts: introduction, plan policies, site policies and projects.

For a homeowner this is useful but limited. The plan does not grant or refuse anything on its own; it shapes how the council decides. For a household project, the plan policies part is the one to read, and a design that answers relevant policies is easier to support. We check whether the property is within the neighbourhood area, read the relevant policies and reference them in the application where they help. It informs the decision rather than replacing it.

Where a Kentish Town house built for one household has been cut into flats, the shell often changed little. That leaves a roof, parapets, chimney stacks, rear addition and drainage serving several homes at once. A leaking valley shows in the top flat, a failed stack in the middle one, a blocked gully in the garden flat.

The repair method starts with the roof and works down. Slate, lead, parapet gutters and outlets are checked as a system before any internal finish is touched. London stock brick needs lime mortar, not hard cement, and sash windows are usually repairable. Where a rear addition has a lean-to roof and thin walls, thermal and damp problems often sit there. In a converted house we confirm who owns each element and price the repair to the demise.

Camden runs a borough-wide additional licensing scheme for houses in multiple occupation. The council’s page explains that additional licensing applies to properties occupied by three or more people forming two or more households. It also covers buildings converted into self-contained flats below the 1991 Building Regulations standard, where fewer than half are owner-occupied. Letting a licensable property without a licence is an offence. The current scheme started in December 2025, so a licence issued under the earlier scheme is worth checking.

For refurbishment this sets the standards the finished work must meet: fire precautions, means of escape, room sizes, kitchens and bathrooms. It also affects the sequence, since a licence may carry conditions with deadlines. We ask landlords for the licence and design to those requirements. A kitchen moved for a nicer layout that leaves a bedroom below the licence standard is not an improvement.

Kentish Town’s residential streets are closely parked and lived in, so a site has to be light. Kentish Town station serves the Northern line and Thameslink, and Tufnell Park is on the Northern line. Deliveries are sized to the street: a small vehicle, a short window and a protected route through the house. Any parking bay the works occupy must be suspended in advance.

On a council road, scaffolding or a hoarding needs Camden’s building licence, and a skip goes on the carriageway under the skip company’s licence. In a terrace without side access, everything from plasterboard to a new bath comes through the front door, so hall protection goes down first. Rear access through a neighbour’s garden needs their agreement, best recorded in writing. Waste, welfare and material storage are planned inside the property or on the forecourt.

In a subdivided house the record is split the way the ownership is. Each owner receives the scope, variations, product information, test certificates and photographs for their demise. The freeholder or management company receives the record of any communal element touched: roof, stacks, drainage, party structures and the common stair. Party wall awards and any schedules of condition are filed with both.

Where the property is licensed as a shared house, the file should show how each licence condition was met. Photographs of fire doors, alarms, escape routes and amenities belong there. Where planning permission or a neighbourhood-plan policy shaped the design, the decision and approved drawings sit in the file. Everything is labelled by floor and room. A converted Kentish Town house can have several owners, and the record has to be legible to all of them.