What drawings do I need to remove a load-bearing wall in London?

Full plans or building notice for an open-plan kitchen

There are two routes to building control approval. A full plans application is checked before work starts, and GOV.UK says you can expect a decision within 5 weeks, or 2 months with your consent. A building notice is for smaller projects: you can start work 2 days after the notice is submitted, but you do not get formal approval of the drawings in advance.

For a single knock-through, a building notice with the calculations attached is common. Where the open-plan room is part of a larger change, such as a rear extension or a loft, full plans gives you an approved set to price from. Either way the calculations and the beam drawing are the documents building control looks at. Our post on building regulations drawings covers the wider set if the wall is one part of a bigger job.

Opening a hallway into a kitchen can also change how you would get out of the upper floors in a fire. Building control may ask about it, so we look at the route out on the drawings at the same time as the beam.

If the opening is part of a larger extension, the building control set grows; what drawings building control needs for an extension lists each sheet.

If the new kitchen also pushes out into the garden, whether you need drawings to extend your kitchen explains the planning side as well.

When the party wall comes into it

In a London terrace or semi, the beam that replaces the wall often bears into the party wall at one end. GOV.UK lists cutting into a party wall as work you must tell your neighbour about, along with removing chimneys from a party wall, which often comes up when a chimney breast goes at the same time.

Notice is given between 2 months and a year before you plan to start. That makes it the step to begin first, because it sets the earliest start date. A detached house, or a beam that bears only on your own walls, does not need one. Our post on party wall notices prices the notice itself.

Is it load-bearing? Do not decide by tapping it

A hollow sound tells you the wall is a stud partition, not that it carries nothing. Clues that a wall is structural include floor joists that run across it rather than alongside it, a wall directly above it on the next floor, or a chimney breast built into it. In Victorian and Edwardian terraces the wall between the front and back reception rooms often carries the floor above.

We check this on the survey visit by looking at the joists and the walls above. If the wall turns out to be a non-load-bearing partition, we tell you, and you will not need the structural fee for it.

A chimney breast is a separate case, because the stack above still needs support; whether you need approval to remove a chimney breast covers it.

If the wall has already gone

Walls do get taken out without approval, sometimes by a previous owner. A local authority can approve work already done through regularisation, for work carried out after 11 November 1985, and you might need to make alterations before it agrees the work complies. That usually means an engineer checking the beam that is there and, where it falls short, a calculation for what is needed.

Leaving it is a risk of its own. GOV.UK warns that the person doing the work could be prosecuted and fined, and that without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when you want to sell. A buyer's solicitor will usually ask about an open-plan ground floor in a period house.