Dean repaints the outside of houses across Wellingborough, a market town about 9.7 miles north-east of Northampton town centre in the NN8 and NN9 postcodes. On Article 4 streets in the town centre conservation area a colour change needs planning permission, so we confirm that before quoting; elsewhere the work is mostly joinery, render and rooflines.
Which Wellingborough is your house in?
The outside of a Wellingborough house depends heavily on when it was built. The medieval core around All Hallows Church and the Market Place is ironstone and limestone. Around it sit the red-brick Victorian and Edwardian streets put up for the boot and shoe trade, Midland Road, Havelock Street, Oxford Street and the eastern streets such as York Road and Mill Road. Beyond those are the large 1960s and 1970s overspill estates at Hemmingwell, Queensway and Kingsway, and now the new extensions at Stanton Cross, Glenvale Park and Park Farm.
Each band asks for a different exterior job. On the older brick streets it is mostly timber sashes, canted bays, panelled front doors and bargeboards. On the estates it is fascias, soffits, doors and garden timber. On the new builds it is usually a first repaint of joinery once the original factory finish starts to tire. Our exterior painting service page sets out the general method, and the notes below cover what is particular to this town.
Article 4: when repainting needs planning permission
The Wellingborough Town Centre Conservation Area covers about 58.2 hectares and holds 93 listed buildings. Since October 2011 an Article 4 direction has applied to named houses of townscape merit, including houses on Park Road, Oxford Street, Moffat Terrace, Westfield Road and Herriots Lane, among other streets. On those houses, painting or rendering a surface that was never treated before, or changing the colour of the exterior, is no longer permitted development.
In practice that means:
- A like-for-like repaint of existing painted joinery in the same colour can go ahead as normal maintenance.
- Going from a white front door to a dark green one, or repainting a cream bay in grey, should be checked with North Northamptonshire Council first.
- Brick or stone that has never been painted stays unpainted unless consent is granted.
Flats and business premises in the conservation area need planning permission for external changes anyway. We would rather spend ten minutes checking at the quoting stage than have a newly painted front you are asked to undo.
Timber sashes and bays on the brick terraces
Victorian terraces here kept their timber sash windows and canted timber or stone bays, and in the conservation area, keeping and mending the originals is the expected route. The 2009 appraisal also notes stone sills that have sometimes been painted over. On these fronts Dean cuts out failed putty, fills or splices small areas of soft timber, primes bare wood the same day, and works the paint into the meeting rails so the sashes still slide when the job is done. A painted-over stone sill gets a breathable finish rather than another layer of gloss.
Ladders on the pavement and low-lying gardens
Much of the town centre is a tight grain of buildings standing on the back edge of the pavement, with narrow lanes such as Salem Lane, Pebble Lane and Buckwell End running between tall boundary walls. The appraisal notes that access to roofs, upper floors and the rears of these buildings can be restricted, and many older houses rely on street parking because removing front walls is discouraged. So we plan ladder or tower positions that leave room for people to pass, sheet the pavement below, and work one elevation at a time.
The town also sits on hills above the River Nene flood plain. Houses on the low ground near the Nene, the Ise and Swanspool Brook can carry damp in their lower walls, so a moisture check comes before any paint on those elevations. Our guide to timing exterior painting in the UK explains why we wait for walls to dry out. For anything about this town beyond exterior work, see our Wellingborough area page.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
