The brief
The client's roofing contractor had already stripped the existing roof tiles before establishing that they weren't in a fit state to be reused, so a full re-tile was needed using an exact-match reclaimed tile. Because the property sits within Birmingham's Moseley St Agnes Conservation Area, this fell outside permitted development and required a full planning application — even though the finished roof would look identical to how it did before, and even though the replacement tiles were a reclaimed match rather than a different product.
Our approach
We produced existing and proposed elevations to accompany the application. By the time of our survey the roof had already been stripped back to felt and battens, so the existing elevations recorded the property in that current, stripped condition, while the proposed elevations specified the reclaimed tile being reinstated. There was no change anywhere else to the building's massing, roofline or elevations — the existing and proposed drawings were otherwise identical, since the point of the application was simply to demonstrate a like-for-like restoration to the planning authority.
The outcome
The elevations were delivered as a clear, straightforward set showing exactly what had changed — a stripped roof being reinstated with matching reclaimed tiles — and what hadn't, ready to be submitted to Birmingham City Council as part of the conservation area planning application.
Working on a property in a conservation area?