Planning and building regulation drawings in Peckham (SE15)

Nunhead reads differently on the ground. It's a hillier, quieter set of streets, Solway Road, Kinsale Road, Dovedale Road, Mundania Road among them, climbing between Nunhead Cemetery and Peckham Rye, and the housing stock is close to uniform: two-storey Victorian and Edwardian terraces with proper rear gardens, a good number of which have already been split into flats. That consistency is a help when you're planning a rear extension, because the side-return depth and the roof pitch your neighbours built to gives a working template. It's also a constraint, because Nunhead Cemetery, Nunhead Green and the wider Telegraph Hill area all carry conservation designation, which pulls roof materials, window replacements and front elevations under closer review than a house just a street or two outside the boundary would face.

Planning in Peckham: what to know before you apply

Southwark runs a fairly standard validation process for householder work: full drawings, a location plan, and, where a conservation area applies, a heritage statement setting out what's changing and why it respects the existing pattern. Anything inside Holly Grove or Rye Lane Peckham conservation areas, or the Nunhead designations, gets that extra layer of scrutiny on materials and massing, and converting a house into flats needs full planning permission everywhere in the borough, conservation area or not. Peckham's town-centre Article 4 direction and its protected shopping frontage rules are aimed at retail and change-of-use in the Rye Lane area, not at ordinary loft or rear-extension work, so most homeowners never encounter them directly. Street trees on several roads carry Tree Preservation Orders, which we check before finalising any scheme that touches root protection zones or overhangs a garden boundary.

Applications are decided by London Borough of Southwark — its planning pages.