Electrically, Fitzrovia does not behave like a residential area, because for most of its recent history it was not one. The flats here sit in buildings that were built or used as something else — showrooms, workshops, offices, retail — and were converted, floor by floor, over decades. What that leaves behind is an electrical installation with a commercial ancestry: supplies sized for a business, distribution designed for a floorplate, landlord's equipment feeding both flats and shops, and containment routed through structure that nobody can now cut into.
Add to that the buildings that are still genuinely mixed-use — your flat above a restaurant, a bar, a gallery or an office — and you get the defining question of electrical work in W1: whose installation is this, and who is allowed to switch it off?
Whose supply is it? The question that decides the day
In a converted mixed-use building, the intake is usually a communal riser or an intake room, and it may contain a landlord's supply, sub-metering, and the origins of circuits feeding commercial units as well as flats. Your flat's installation begins somewhere downstream of all that, and where exactly is not always obvious from inside your hallway.
This matters the moment work requires isolation. If the point you need to isolate at is in the landlord's equipment, then it is the building's contractor or building manager who does it, on the building's terms, at a time agreed with the commercial tenants — because turning off the wrong thing in a building like this does not inconvenience a neighbour, it stops a business trading. We have seen genuinely simple jobs lose a day to this. It is entirely preventable with one call to the managing agent before the work is booked.
Ex-commercial buildings also throw up supply arrangements you would not expect in a home. Three-phase supplies are common in this stock, and a converted flat can find itself connected to one, or sitting next to one, or with a landlord's three-phase distribution running through a cupboard in it. Three-phase is not a problem — it is an important thing to know about before someone opens a board expecting a domestic single-phase installation. Tell whoever is quoting you if you have any reason to think it is there.
What conversion leaves behind
Conversions were done to the standards and budgets of their day, and the tell-tales are consistent. Commercial-grade distribution equipment left in place because it worked, now serving a dwelling and reaching an age where parts are no longer available. Circuits designed around a floorplate rather than a flat — so the layout makes no sense until you realise the sockets follow where desks used to be. Lighting circuits that were once a single commercial installation, subdivided at conversion with joints left in a ceiling void that is now above someone's bed.
Then there is the containment. In a concrete-framed or steel-framed building, cables run in trunking, conduit or trays fixed to structure, or in the void of a raised floor left over from the office fit-out, or behind boxing that reads as a bulkhead. What you cannot do is chase into the frame. That is the practical reality that surprises people who want a socket in the middle of a wall or a downlight in a particular spot: the route to it may be long, visible, or genuinely unavailable, and the honest answer is sometimes to move the design rather than butcher the building.
Raised floors and deep ceiling voids also make an installation seem more accessible than it is, because they are usually full — ventilation ducting, waste pipework from the bathrooms that were placed far from any stack, and in some buildings sprinkler pipework serving the whole floor. Drilling blind in this stock is how a modest job becomes a bad week for the tenant below.
Interference from downstairs — and the faults it causes
Sharing a building with commercial tenants has electrical consequences that homeowners rarely anticipate. Commercial kitchens, refrigeration, air conditioning plant, lifts and shop equipment are heavy, cyclical loads, and where residential flats sit on the same building infrastructure the interaction can show up in the flat. The classic report is a fault that has a schedule: lights that dim or flicker at a particular time each day, a device that trips only in the evening, a hum that arrives when the restaurant does.
The mistake is to treat that as a fault inside the flat and go hunting for it there. Often the flat is fine and what you are seeing originates outside it — which means the diagnosis is worth doing carefully before anything is replaced, and it means the eventual conversation may be with the managing agent rather than with your own contractor. We would rather spend the time establishing that than sell you a new consumer unit that changes nothing you can see.
Plant noise and vibration is the same story in a different form. Extract and refrigeration equipment serving a commercial unit is frequently fixed to the building's structure, and structure transmits. If a flat has a persistent hum, an electrician is not always the answer, but an electrician who understands mixed-use buildings will at least tell you that rather than chase it around your wiring.
The Georgian terraces
Where the original terraces survive around Charlotte Street and Fitzroy Square, the picture reverts to something more familiar: partial rewires layered over decades, cable routes that are a genuine struggle in lath and plaster over solid brick, main bonding that made sense before the pipework was partly replaced in plastic, and consumer units that tell you exactly when the last owner cared. Where a building is listed or in a conservation area, the constraint mostly concerns fabric and what is visible externally, and it is worth confirming with the local authority rather than assuming. Internally it usually means the cable takes the longer, more considered route and the cornice is protected rather than sacrificed.
Fire compartmentation is worth naming here too, because electrical work is one of the main ways it gets damaged. In a converted building, the floors and walls separating your flat from the flat next door and from the commercial unit below are fire-separating elements. Every cable that passes through one of them makes a hole, and every hole has to be reinstated properly. In a purpose-built home this is routine. In a building that was cut up into flats over several phases by several contractors, the standard of what is already there varies, and a rewire is the moment either to improve it or to quietly make it worse. It is invisible, it is skipped constantly, and in a mixed-use building with a restaurant underneath it is not a detail.
The rules — and what they mean here
Electrical work in dwellings falls under Building Regulations Part P and installations are designed and tested to BS 7671. If the flat is let, the installation must be inspected and tested at least every five years under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, and you must be able to produce the report.
EICRs in Fitzrovia's converted stock are worth commissioning with realistic expectations. Installations that were assembled from a commercial original, altered at conversion and altered again since, tend to produce findings — not because anyone was careless, but because the standard moved and the installation did not. Better to know. If you own a flat here and have never seen a report on it, that is the first thing to fix.
Most flats are leasehold and most leases require freeholder or managing-agent consent for alterations, and in a mixed-use building the lease may carry additional conditions reflecting the commercial tenants — hours, access, insurance, protection of common parts. These vary considerably. Ask early.
Access, hours and getting the work done
Fitzrovia's streets are narrow, restricted and busy with deliveries to the businesses on them. There is often nowhere legal to stop. For electrical work that is manageable — the materials are not bulky — but a rewire generates waste and needs kit, and both have to be timed rather than assumed.
Working hours are the bigger constraint. In a building with commercial tenants, the permitted window for noisy work is set by the lease and the managing agent and can be narrow and counter-intuitive: sometimes early morning before a restaurant opens, sometimes precisely not during office hours. Chasing and lifting floors are noisy. Establish the hours before the job is priced, because they determine how long it takes.
What to send us
Photograph the consumer unit with the cover off, and its labelling. Photograph the meter and the intake if you can reach them. Tell us the building and what is below you. Tell us if it is an ex-commercial conversion, if there is a raised floor, if there is any three-phase equipment. If something trips, tell us exactly what was running. Send it through the quote form and you get a scope instead of an exploratory visit you pay for.
Electrical work is from £80, published before anyone attends. Beyond a straightforward call-out you get an itemised fixed quote before work starts. Jobs run in a fixed order: establish the supply and the isolation, confirm access and hours, fixed scope, protection, first fix, inspection, second fix, test, certificate.
Electrics here rarely travel alone — a pump, a fan or a towel rail brings the other trade with it, which is why our Fitzrovia plumbing sits under the same point of contact. If a bathroom is the trigger, see bathroom refurbishment in Fitzrovia; if it is a whole flat, refurbishment is the better starting point. There is more on the local stock on our Fitzrovia page and on the trade itself on our electrical services page.