What I take on, and where I stop
The work is site acquisition and delivery, not construction. I look for small parcels — an infill plot in a village, a paddock with a frontage, a yard behind a terrace — and test whether a buildable scheme exists before money moves. From there I run the planning route, commission the technical design, and put the trades on in the order the build needs.
Bricklaying, groundworks, roofing and first fix are all done by tradespeople I appoint under their own contracts. My part is the sequence: the drawing a trade is handed is the current one, the condition covering their work is discharged, and the trade before them has finished the surface they rely on.
Walking a site: access first
I look at access before anything else, because a site with no achievable splay is not a site. A splay is the triangle of clear visibility a driver needs pulling out of a new entrance; if the land keeping it clear belongs to a neighbour, the scheme carries a problem good design will not solve.
Services come second. I trace the foul route on the ground and not on a plan, because a manhole in a neighbour’s garden is a wayleave conversation and a rising main under the only driveway is a cost I want priced before I bid.
Ground and boundaries come last in the walk and first in the risk register: Cornwall gives shallow rock in one field and made ground in the next, and I read boundaries against the title plan with a tape, because hedges move and deeds do not.
What has to be true before I make an offer
An offer goes in when four things hold at once: an access I can build and keep clear; a foul drainage answer, either a mains connection with capacity or a treatment plant with somewhere lawful to discharge; a policy position that gives the scheme a fair hearing; and a gross-to-net that survives the constraints.
Gross-to-net is the difference between the area on the title and the area left once roads, splays, drainage, garden depths and root protection zones come out of it, and on a small Cornish plot it is why two sites of the same acreage carry a very different number of houses.
Where one of the four is unresolved I still offer, but the offer says so on its face and is conditional on the answer arriving, because an unconditional bid on an unanswered question is how a developer ends up owning a field.
Constraints and consents mapper
Every constraint on a site pulls a report or a consent along behind it. Tick what a site has and the sentences below say what I would expect to commission, and who would prepare it. It counts nothing and prices nothing.
Nothing is ticked, so nothing is implied yet.
That is the list I would expect to commission. A pre-application response usually adds one to it. Read it as the shape of the work a site of that description tends to carry, and not as a quotation or an assurance that consent follows; each report writer scopes their own piece.
Asking the authority before I ask for permission
A pre-application enquiry buys an officer’s written view of a scheme before it becomes public, and it earns its fee wherever the principle of development is arguable. I ask a few answerable questions: is residential development acceptable here in principle, and what would you need to see before you could recommend approval.
What comes back is an opinion and not a decision, and I read it that way: it binds nobody and it is overtaken by a change of policy, but it tells me which parts of the scheme are contested, and that is usually the difference between a clean determination and a year of rounds.
What actually goes into the application
The drawings are the smallest part of the bundle. Location and block plans, existing and proposed floor plans, elevations and sections, and a site plan carrying levels, parking, drainage and boundary treatments come from the architect working to my brief.
Around them sit the reports the constraints have called for, a design and access statement explaining why the scheme looks as it does, and the certificates recording who owns the land and who has had notice. Where the authority validates against a local list, an ecology assessment and a biodiversity net gain metric will be on it, and a missing one stops the clock.
Each piece is prepared by whoever is qualified to sign it; I write the brief, hold the programme, keep every consultant on the same revision of the same drawing, and submit.
Conditions, and which of them bite first
Consent arrives with conditions, and the ones that matter are pre-commencement: those whose wording says no development shall take place until the authority has approved something. Until they are discharged, work on site is unlawful even though permission exists, so I read a decision notice for that phrase first.
They usually cover materials, surface water drainage, the construction management plan, archaeology where the historic environment team has flagged the ground, and the highway works. Discharging one means submitting what it asks for under a formal application and waiting out the determination period, so I stack them, critical path first.
Reserved matters are a different animal: where consent was granted in outline, the appearance, landscaping, layout, scale and access were held back for a later approval that has to be determined before any of them is built.
Between consent and start on site
The gap between permission and a spade is where a scheme is made or lost. In it I have the technical package produced: building regulations drawings, a structural design with foundations written against the actual ground investigation, the drainage design above and below ground, and the setting-out the groundworker builds to.
By the time the first machine arrives I want the building control route chosen and the notice lodged, the utility connections applied for with lead times booked, and every trade holding the same drawing number, because a connection date is not something a builder can accelerate.
The order the trades come on
The sequence is a dependency chain, and each trade needs something finished by the one in front. Groundworkers strip, dig and pour, and need the setting-out, the drainage design and the conditions covering access and archaeology discharged. Bricklayers need a level, cured deck with the damp-proof course detail agreed.
Carpenters follow onto the wall plate; roofers need that structure signed off; scaffolders bracket the whole of it and have to be told the roof line before they build the lift. First fix electrical and plumbing go in against a fixed layout, because a socket moved after plastering is a chased wall.
My job through that is coordination and inspection: booking each trade against a realistic date for the one before, walking the work before it is covered up, and holding the building control inspections the notice requires. Where a trade waits on a detail from a consultant, chasing it is mine.
Schemes in south-east Cornwall
The ground I work is the south-east corner of the county: the Looe and Liskeard hinterland, the Seaton valley, and the villages between. Schemes here are small by definition — a dwelling on an infill plot, a pair of houses behind a frontage, a handful on a former yard — and the constraints listed above are the ordinary condition of that ground.
Live schemes sit at the stages described here: some are still being walked and tested, some are inside the planning route, some are past consent. Addresses and plot numbers stay off this page while a scheme is live, because a neighbour should hear about it from the notice on the lamp post first, but I will talk through what is running with anyone who has reason to ask.
Back up to the head of this note, where my address and e-mail are