How Close To A Boundary Can My Garden Room Be?

Planning Consultant Mark Doodes answers your questions.

New Garden Room company offers a one-stop shop for your Garden Room, and that includes access to planning professionals.

We often receive questions from potential customers regarding the planning requirements and realise it causes a lot of uncertainty and stress, so we invited a planning expert to come and meet our Managing Director, Darren Field and discuss the issues impacting you – separating the truths from the myths and cutting through the noise to ensure you become more informed.

The regulations for this are pretty generous and they are available on the planning portal website, so that’s worth visiting.

In summary, if you are within two metres of a boundary, you can erect in outbuilding up to two and a half metres high. If you’re more than two metres away, you can have an outbuilding which is three metres high with a flat roof, or four metres high with a pitched roof.

A lot of people ask, “what is the height – the ground height that you’re taking those measurements from?” Here I refer people to page six of the 2019 Technical Guidance on Permitted Development Rights, where there is a definition of the words about where the heights are taken from. It’s the natural ground height – so of the highest part of the building.

If you’re on a falling site it’s actually the distance – the two and a half metres or three metres from the highest point on that site. So if their outbuilding needs to rise slightly in order to keep that eaves line horizontal, then so be it – as long as it doesn’t ever become a two-story building.

But you don’t need to be afraid, even if your building is closer than that dimension. It just triggers the need for a planning application to be submitted, and as I’ve said in other videos, a significant majority of around 90% of the planning applications of householder nature are approved, and the council will see it as a possibility of being able to add or impose conditions on the use of that building. So there are benefits to the local authority of an application being made, whereas under permitted development they wouldn’t be able to impose those conditions.

For more information, see our other videos featuring Planning Consultant Mark Doodes.

Recorded February 2023. This content does not constitute formal advice from New Garden Room Company or Mark Doodes Planning.