Dormer, mansard, hip-to-gable, L-shape, Velux — whatever the Ealing roofline in question will take. Certificate route or full planning, then building regulations, the engineer's calculations, and notice to the neighbours, all at a fixed price.
Frequently not. Ealing issued 2,048 lawful development certificates in three years, one of the highest counts in London, and its Datahub set records 1,695 rear dormer applications at 70% approved. The borough settles 98.6% of householder decisions inside eight weeks.
| Measure | Ealing | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Lawful development certificates issued | 2,048 | — |
| Rear dormer applications in the Datahub | 1,695 | 70% approved |
| Mansard applications in the Datahub | 572 | 67% approved |
| Loft conversion applications in the Datahub | 159 | 49% approved |
| Householder decisions | 3,182 | 86.6% approved |
| Decided inside eight weeks | 98.6% | — |
Sources: rows two to four from the Planning London Datahub, retrieved 15 August 2026 — phrase-matched descriptions, comparable within Ealing only, and a low count on one phrase usually means the borough describes that work differently rather than that it does not happen. Rows one, five and six from MHCLG PS1 and PS2, twelve quarters to March 2026.
In Ealing — Victorian and Edwardian villas in Ealing central; 1930s semi-detached in Northolt and Hanwell; mansion blocks along main roads; Bedford Park is a listed Arts & Crafts garden suburb for the most part — a loft conversion drawings package is the full measured-survey-to-submission drawing set London Borough of Ealing needs in order to determine an application: existing and proposed plans, elevations and sections at 1:100 and 1:50, a location and site plan, and the supporting statements the case officer asks for.
Prepared and reviewed by the chartered technologist team at Architectural Drawings London — MCIAT chartered, £2m PI insured.Last reviewed 2026-08-03.
Every loft type across every Ealing roof line — dormer, mansard, hip-to-gable, L-shape, Velux. LDC or full planning route, building regulations, structural calculations and party wall notices, all fixed price.
Housing stock in Ealing: Victorian and Edwardian villas in Ealing central; 1930s semi-detached in Northolt and Hanwell; mansion blocks along main roads; Bedford Park is a listed Arts & Crafts garden suburb.
Character: Leafy outer-west London; Bedford Park conservation area has strict heritage controls; rest of borough generally permissive.
Article 4: Ealing's Article 4 cover for HMOs is street-specific rather than borough-wide, naming particular roads in Acton, Ealing and Southall.
Head height and structural capacity are settled before a price goes on anything. There is no sense quoting for a conversion an Ealing roof cannot physically take.
The Lawful Development Certificate is the usual Ealing route — 2,048 certificate decisions across those twelve quarters. Two things stop it: an Article 4 direction, or a conservation designation. Both get checked before a route is committed to.
Option studies including massing, internal layout and roof geometry.
The parts of the regulations that bite on a loft: Part K on the stair, Part B on getting out in a fire, Part L at the insulation line, Part E on sound where one dwelling sits over another.
Ridge beam and purlin design, new steelwork, floor joists brought up to a habitable load, the dormer frame itself: calculated in-house, and every sheet carrying a chartered engineer's signature.
Party wall notices come with almost every Ealing loft, for the plain reason that almost every Ealing loft puts weight on a wall somebody else half owns. We draft them and deal with whatever surveyors get appointed afterwards.
Single planning or regs submission.
Planning + building regs + structural.
Listed, conservation, complex sites.
Move the controls for an indicative figure. It anchors your budget — it is not a quote. Every project is priced after a free survey.
Build costs are separate and quoted by your contractor. See our published fees.
A district-by-district table for Ealing: what we draw there, what the housing is made of, and who validates a conversion at an address in it. The money shown is the statutory England application fee for 2026, payable to the council — it is not an estimate for the conversion.
| Postcode | Area | Dominant stock | What it means for a loft conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| W5 | Ealing | Edwardian villas, Victorian terraces | W5 is Ealing town itself and sits almost wholly inside the borough, so a loft submitted from a W5 address goes to Ealing Council in all but a handful of edge cases. |
| W7 | Hanwell | Edwardian villas, 1930s semi-detached | Hanwell fills W7, and W7 stays inside the borough, which makes Ealing Council the validating authority for every loft in it. |
| W13 | West Ealing | Edwardian terraces | West Ealing addresses in W13 are Ealing's to determine, under the Local Plan policies the borough wrote for that part of itself. |
| UB1 | Southall North | Edwardian terraces, post-war flats | UB1 is Southall North, and Ealing's alone; officers there work to the UB1 conservation-area mapping. |
| UB2 | Southall South | Edwardian terraces, post-war flats | Southall South is UB2 — again wholly Ealing, and its own conservation-area mapping governs what a loft there may look like. |
| UB5 | Northolt | 1930s semi-detached, post-war estates | Northolt is UB5 throughout, handled by Ealing Council, with the UB5 conservation-area map applied by the officers who cover that ground. |
| UB6 | Greenford / Perivale | 1930s semi-detached | UB6 takes in Greenford and Perivale, both inside the borough, both read against the UB6 conservation-area map by the case officers covering that patch. |
| NW10 | Willesden / Harlesden / Kensal Green | Modern apartments, post-war estates | NW10 is divided at Willesden, Harlesden and Kensal Green. Brent may determine a loft there, or Ealing may, so the address is put against both policies maps first. |
Pitch, wall build-up, plot depth: all three move every few Ealing streets, and between them they decide what the loft at one particular address can be made into.
Conservation areas covering Ealing: Ealing Council runs 30, and Acton Green, Hanwell, Ealing Broadway are the ones Ealing owners meet most. A loft conversion inside a Ealing conservation area loses permitted development, so the Ealing submission is a householder application at £548 decided in 8 weeks — not a £249 prior approval decided in 6 weeks. In Pitshanger a loft conversion is judged on the street elevation first.
What Article 4 removes near Ealing: Article 4 for HMOs in specific streets in Acton, Ealing and Southall. Before pricing a loft conversion we check whether the W3 address is inside the mapped area, because Ealing Council draws the Ealing boundary street by street rather than across the whole of Ealing.
What Ealing is built from: Victorian and Edwardian villas in Ealing central; 1930s semi-detached in Northolt and Hanwell; mansion blocks along main roads; Bedford Park is a listed Arts & Crafts garden suburb. Leafy outer-west London; Bedford Park conservation area has strict heritage controls; rest of borough generally permissive. That mix decides the loft conversion route in Ealing more than the postcode does, and it is what a Ealing Council case officer reads first. A householder application costs £548 paid to Ealing Council direct, with 8 weeks to a decision once validated.
Sources for this Ealing loft conversion page: borough policies maps and conservation-area registers (2025–26), Royal Mail postcode district boundaries, the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications) (England) Regulations, the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 as amended, and the Party Wall etc. Act 1996.
Lofts in Ealing mostly end in a certificate rather than a permission, so the appeal record worth reading here is the certificate record. 61 lawful development certificate appeals were decided in the decade of casework running to 2026: 26 allowed, 33 dismissed, 2 split. Allowed comes out at 42.6% where the same casework puts London at 37.5%. Read that for what it is. It is the score in the minority of cases where the council disputed that work was permitted at all and the owner fought back — not a measure of how often anything gets permission.
The middle Ealing appeal took more than 221 days between starting and being decided, and none of that overlaps the council's own determination period — it comes after it. 95.1% were settled on written representations alone, meaning an inspector read the papers and never met anyone. Being right first time is a great deal cheaper than being right on appeal a year later.
The Ealing figure is 61 lawful development certificate appeals decided. Casework counts come from the Planning Inspectorate statistics collection, reused here under OGL v3.0.
The questions Ealing homeowners put to us about loft drawings, week after week, answered as directly as the facts allow.
Start a free quote →It depends on your exact address in Ealing. Most standard loft conversions qualify as Permitted Development (no planning permission needed) if under 40m³ for terraced or 50m³ for semi-detached, with matching materials and 20cm eaves setback. However Ealing has Article 4 Directions that may remove these rights — and flats, conservation areas and listed buildings always require full planning. We confirm permitted development eligibility at the free feasibility visit.
An Ealing loft carries two prices. Ours takes in the planning or certificate route, the regulations drawings and the calculations, agreed as one figure before anything starts. The builder's depends heavily on form: stripping a roof back for a mansard is a wholly different job from hanging a dormer on the back of one. Ours is quoted up front, and the fee page carries the numbers.
Historically there are few mansards in Ealing, and the council takes each application as it finds it rather than applying a blanket line. Set on a suitable terrace or semi and cut to follow the roofscape it joins, a rear mansard does carry. The design has to be right, and where heritage is engaged the commentary supporting it has to be there as well.
2.3m from the top of the existing ceiling joist up to the existing ridge is the practical floor for a conventional Ealing conversion. Under 2.2m the choice narrows to lowering the ceilings in the rooms below, or going to a mansard instead.
Party Wall Act notices go to every adjoining owner on most Ealing lofts. On the denser terraced streets near Ealing Broadway a rear dormer can raise right-to-light questions too, which are civil matters and no business of the planning officer. Both are handled here.
Ealing's victorian and Edwardian villas in Ealing central stock lends itself to rear dormers (most common), hip-to-gable (semi-detached), and mansard (period terraces and conservation contexts). Velux-only conversions are possible where ridge height allows. We recommend the best structural and planning route at survey.
We cover all Ealing postcodes — W3, W5, W7, W13, UB1, UB2, UB5, UB6, NW10 — with surveyors based locally. Survey appointments within 3 working days. Our structural engineer is London-based and attends site when required.
Steel going in, or a party wall going up, means notice to adjoining owners on nearly every loft here. We run that correspondence while our own engineer handles the structure behind it. Fourteen days of silence from a neighbour counts in law as dissent, and surveyors then get appointed.
If your property sits on a boundary, here are the neighbouring options.
Ealing logged 2,048 certificate of lawful development decisions across the three financial years MHCLG has now published, ending March 2026. That is the route most lofts in this borough take, and the same chartered team here handles the survey, the drawings, the structure and the certificate application itself.
A construction-ready drawing package compliant with every Approved Document — Part A structure, Part B fire, Part L thermal, Part M accessib...
The whole spectrum — rear extensions, side returns, wraparounds, double-storey, basement digs. Planning-led design with detailed technical p...
Ealing's most space-efficient loft solution when PD-route dormers are blocked. Our chartered team designs mansards that get approved in Eali...
Turn your unused Ealing garage into a bedroom, home office or open-plan kitchen-diner. Planning route assessment, full building regulations ...
Full architectural technology service for basement digs and cellar conversions in Ealing — structural underpinning design, waterproofing str...
Chartered structural engineer calculations for every residential intervention in Ealing — steel beams, lintels, pad foundations, wall remova...
Measured surveys across Ealing — floor plans, elevations and sections to ±3mm accuracy. Leica Disto laser + BLK360 point-cloud scanning, Aut...
End-to-end Party Wall Act 1996 service for Ealing — Section 1, 3 and 6 notices, schedule of condition surveys, party wall award coordination...
London's most popular loft type — the full-width rear dormer. Planning or Permitted Development route assessed for your Ealing property, bui...
Leave your number and an Architectural technologist will call you back within 30 minutes during working hours.
No obligation. No sales pressure. Just expert advice about loft conversion drawings in Ealing.
Free quote in 60 seconds. No hourly billing. MCIAT chartered.
Get my free quote →
