Plot watch
Could the overgrown plot that Ray and Maya Kerr found on Google Maps be the right self build site for their dream home? Mike Dade takes a closer look
Mike Dade assesses a site’s potential
Ray and Maya Kerr are keen to construct their own home and have spent a good deal of time poring over magazines, attending self build shows and looking at catalogues. They love the idea of designing an energyefficient house that suits their particular lifestyle and tastes. They want to live in their hometown to be close to friends and family, but in the last twelve months not a single building plot has come onto the market. They’re now searching for suitable looking bits of land with the view to seeing whether an owner would be willing to sell.
They have found a conveniently central overgrown site that doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose. Could this become a viable building plot? How can they find out and go about trying to buy it?
Ray and Maya found this patch by looking for empty spaces on Google maps. While searching, they quickly discovered that many promising-looking sites – particularly on housing estates – actually serve some amenity purpose and were probably designated as such as part of a landscaping scheme when the estate was laid out. But this plot is different; it’s tucked behind high street shops, with a frontage to a side road.
Measuring about 20m wide and 25m deep, it appears to be just overgrown grass, scrub and brambles. Ray and Maya have discovered it’s been in much the same state for the last 20 years. The obvious challenges are its elevated position next to the adjoining street and large concrete retaining wall, which is around 1.5m-3m tall. There are no windows overlooking the plot on the neighbouring properties, so a new house shouldn’t cause amenity issues.
Getting started
With a site like this, it’s important for the Kerrs to quickly find out who owns it and whether they’d contemplate selling the land. Equally, that exercise is pointless if there’s little prospect of gaining planning permission. Luckily, the initial steps in investigating both questions can be done with minimal commitment of time or money.
The district council’s website is a good place to start on the quest to working out who the landowners are. Here it should be possible to research whether any planning applications have been made on it and, if so, who by. Many authorities’ websites have a map search resource which would be handy here in the absence of any obvious address. If this isn’t available, it might be necessary to look at all applications in the road and trawl through to see if the site comes up. If there has been an application, the owners’ names will be on the forms. If there’s no planning history, Ray and Maya can try the Land Registry online search facility, although property that hasn’t changed hands for many years isn’t always registered. If that doesn’t yield anything it will be down to good oldfashioned detective work, asking around to neighbours and local shops.
Planning & practicalities
As the land is within a town, infilling and small-scale housing is likely to be acceptable in principle. The couple could put some sketches together and seek pre-application advice from the council to confirm this – they don’t need to own the land, or have the owners’ permission to do so. However, with a site like this there are some issues to address around the retaining wall and how access could be gained, which they need to look into before they contact the council.
Another planning concern that will need investigation is the question of whether the site might harbour any protected species. Even in a town, overgrown land like this can be home to badgers or reptiles and because it’s so overgrown it’s difficult to tell what’s there. The presence of protected species is rarely fatal to the prospects of developing a plot, but Ray and Maya will need to factor the cost of an ecological survey into their budget.
The big retaining wall at the front of this site raises a number of key questions. Is it stable and will it need repair or replacement? How could you get access into the plot? Are the ground conditions on the land itself stable? Any or all of these points could have significant implications for the cost of developing the land, which could be the reason the site hasn’t been built on thus far. An initial chat with a surveyor or the council’s building control department should give the couple an idea of what they might be up against.
Another thing to consider is whether they would actually need on-site parking. The location is a short walk from the town centre, with a station and bus service nearby, so they would only have a limited need for a car. There’s on-street parking, although inevitably in such a central location, this gets pretty full up. A scan through town centre planning applications might give some clues as to the