Central London's residential stock is overwhelmingly old. Georgian townhouses and terraces, Victorian and Edwardian houses and mansion blocks, and endless conversions of all of them. If you are refurbishing here, you are almost certainly working in a building that was designed around materials, tolerances and assumptions that no longer appear in a modern specification.
That is not a problem to be overcome. It is the thing to understand. Most period refurbishment failures are not failures of craft — they are a good modern detail installed in a building that responds to it badly. The building then does something inconvenient, and everyone blames the building.
The single most useful idea: these buildings breathe
Georgian and Victorian construction is generally solid-walled, built in lime mortar with lime plaster, and it manages moisture by letting it move. Water gets into the fabric and evaporates back out again. The wall is not sealed; it is permeable, and that permeability is the mechanism by which it stays sound.
Modern construction does the opposite. It resists moisture with barriers and cavities. Cement render, gypsum plaster, impermeable paint and non-breathable insulation are all designed to stop water rather than let it pass.
Put the second onto the first and you trap moisture inside a wall that was relying on being able to dry. Cement render on a solid lime wall does not stop damp — it relocates it, usually upward or inward, and often to a place that is harder to see and more expensive to fix. Impermeable paint on lime plaster blisters and takes the plaster with it. This is the origin of an enormous proportion of the damp that gets diagnosed as rising damp in old London houses, and of an enormous proportion of the chemical injection treatment that follows and does not work.
The practical instinct that follows: in a breathing building, use breathing materials. Lime plaster, lime mortar, mineral or breathable paints. It is not romanticism. It is compatibility.
Damp: diagnose before you treat
Damp in a period property is usually one of a small number of things, and only one of them is exotic. Rainwater goods that are blocked or leaking. Ground levels or a path raised above the original level. Cement pointing or render trapping moisture. A leaking pipe. Condensation, which in a small flat is far more common than anything structural — see ventilation and condensation.
What all of those have in common is that they are findable. The productive sequence is: find where the water is coming from, stop it, let the fabric dry, and only then decide whether anything else is needed. Frequently nothing else is needed. Treating a symptom you have not traced is how people spend serious money and still have a damp wall.
What is behind the surfaces
Period buildings in this part of London have been serviced three or four times over. What we routinely find when things come apart:
- Lead supply pipe. Still present in older stock. If the floor is up anyway, replacing it is worth doing on its own merits.
- Abandoned runs. Pipes capped and forgotten, sometimes still live. Old wiring left in place. Gas runs that no longer go anywhere.
- Improvised alterations. Joists notched to the point of weakness, a wall removed without anything obvious holding what was above it, a bathroom added into a return with a waste that never had proper fall.
- Timber that has been damp for years. Behind a bath panel, under a window, at the end of a joist built into an external wall. Usually caused by one of the damp mechanisms above.
- Lath and plaster. Which behaves nothing like plasterboard and cannot be treated as though it does.
None of this is visible on a viewing and only some of it is visible on a survey. Which is why a period refurbishment should be priced with named assumptions and a real client-held contingency, and why the strip-out is a discovery stage rather than an administrative one. Our flat refurbishment cost guide covers how that affects pricing.
Consent, and taking it seriously
Listed building consent is generally required for works affecting a building's special character, and this is the point most owners underestimate: it applies to interiors as much as to the front elevation. Panelling, chimneypieces, staircases, cornices, joinery, original floors and the plan form itself can all be part of what is protected. Removing an internal wall in a listed house is not a private decision. Conservation area controls add further planning constraints, particularly to anything visible externally — a new vent, a flue, a soil pipe, a rooflight, a window change.
Two more. If you are in a flat, most leases require freeholder or managing agent consent for alterations, typically as a licence to alter, and typically triggered by moving waste, touching structure, or changing floor finishes. Many Central London freeholds sit with large estates and their requirements vary considerably, so check your lease and ask rather than assume. And the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 applies to notifiable works — in a terrace, where every house shares walls, that is more often than people expect, and the notice periods are statutory.
The realistic view is that in period stock, consent sets the calendar. The building work is the predictable part. Our guides to listed building consent, licences to alter and freeholder consent cover the shape of each. Ask the questions before you draw the scheme, because a scheme designed around an assumption that turns out to be wrong is a scheme redrawn.
Services in a building that was never designed for them
The hardest part of a period refurbishment is usually not the finish. It is getting modern services through a building with no service voids, no risers and fabric you are not free to chase into.
The rule is: find the smallest reversible route. Lift boards rather than cut them. Work from a later stud wall or a cupboard rather than an original partition. Use an existing void rather than chase a new channel. Put access panels where a previous generation already altered something. Period houses have been serviced repeatedly, so there are almost always twentieth-century voids and old runs to exploit — a good contractor looks for those first.
Drainage is the constraint that shapes everything else. These buildings were not built with today's bathroom count. Every new WC needs a waste route with fall to an existing stack, and in a listed building in a conservation area, adding a new soil pipe to a visible elevation runs straight into consent. So bathrooms want to stack over each other, work within the fall the floor depth allows, or accept a pumped waste. Discover that on a drawing, not on site. See plumbing and our bathroom refurbishment page.
Electrics need the same discipline. Work falls under Part P and installations are to BS 7671, and rewiring a period house means threading circuits through a building that resents it. Plan the routes before the first board comes up. See electrical.
Windows, floors and the things people replace too quickly
Two elements attract the wrecking instinct more than any other, and both are usually worth keeping.
Original windows. Georgian and Victorian timber sashes were made from slow-grown timber that is denser and more durable than most of what is available now, and they were designed to be repaired — a rotten sill or a decayed bottom rail can be spliced rather than the whole unit binned. In a listed building or a conservation area, replacing them is likely to be controlled in any case. A properly overhauled sash with new cords, sound joinery, draught-stripping and secondary glazing behind it will perform far better than most people assume, and it will still be there when a modern replacement has been thrown away twice.
Original floors. Wide-board pine and later parquet are frequently under something later and worse. Lifting a tired carpet in a period flat and finding a floor worth saving is a common and cheerful discovery. Boards can be lifted carefully, re-laid and finished; they cannot be un-cut once someone has run a saw across them for a pipe. Our wood flooring work is from £30/m², and in a flat it is worth checking the lease on floor finishes and acoustic requirements before changing a carpeted floor to a hard one.
Protection is part of the work, not an overhead
An original staircase, a pine floor, a lime-plastered wall and a moulded cornice do not tolerate a casual approach to dust and traffic. Boards down, edges taped, dust screens on every room not in scope, and a route in and out that does not run through the parts of the building you care about most. In a house you are protecting the fabric. In a flat you are also protecting the common parts — lift blankets, hall coverings, and cleaning what you pass through, all under the building's own rules on hours and access.
The instinct worth carrying through the whole job
Reversibility. Wherever there is a choice, choose the option a future owner could undo without damage. It is what conservation officers respond to, it is what protects the building, and it is very often the cheaper decision anyway because it involves destroying less. A building that has survived two hundred years has done so because most of the people who worked on it did not do anything permanent enough to matter.
How we work in old buildings
Survey first, then a fixed quote against a defined scope with the assumptions written down, then work — with consent sorted before dates are promised, because in this stock the consent is the programme. One point of contact, our own trades sequenced properly, protection down from the first day to the last, and the property left clean. Refurbishment is per quotation, bathrooms from £2,800, tiling from £55/m², wood flooring from £30/m². Tell us about the building — its age, whether it is listed, and whether you are leasehold — before you tell us about the finish.