Planning Drawings · Southwark
Planning Permission Drawings in Southwark
No hourly billing
3–4 weeks to submission
Covering all Southwark postcodes
They are read against a borough that says yes to 93.8% of the householder applications it decides and settles 95.8% inside eight weeks. The work comes earlier: Southwark holds 480 Article 4 areas, second only to Waltham Forest. It issued 604 lawful development certificates over the same window.
| Measure | Southwark | London |
|---|---|---|
| Householder approval rate | 93.8% | 83.0% |
| Decided inside eight weeks | 95.8% | — |
| Article 4 areas in the register | 480 | second most of the 16 boroughs in the Article 4 register |
| Conservation areas | 56 covering 782 ha | 1,141 across London |
| Householder decisions made | 1,617 | 77,680 |
| Planning drawing package | from £840 | our fixed fee |
| Householder planning application fee | £548 | statutory, England 2026 |
Sources: decision figures from MHCLG District Planning Application Statistics (PS1 and PS2), twelve quarters to March 2026; registers from the MHCLG Planning Data Platform, retrieved 1 September 2026; the statutory fee from the Fees for Applications Regulations 2012 as amended; the package fee is our own published fixed fee.
In Southwark — Georgian and Regency in Bermondsey and Borough; Victorian terraces in Camberwell and Peckham; Dulwich Estate controlled housing; riverside new-build for the most part — a planning permission drawings package is the full measured-survey-to-submission drawing set London Borough of Southwark 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.
Housing stock in Southwark: Georgian and Regency in Bermondsey and Borough; Victorian terraces in Camberwell and Peckham; Dulwich Estate controlled housing; riverside new-build.
Character: Dulwich Estate private planning scheme affects much of SE21 and SE22; Southwark planning for rest of borough; strong heritage context.
Article 4: Article 4 for HMOs borough-wide; additional Article 4 for office-to-residential in Bermondsey and Elephant & Castle.
A chartered technologist comes out and laser-measures every room, normally 60 to 90 minutes at the property, and that survey becomes the base for every drawing produced afterwards.
Drafted in Revit or AutoCAD at 1:100 or 1:50, annotated to the level Southwark validation expects, and issued as a council-ready set rather than a sketch you then pay somebody else to formalise.
Unlimited revisions until you approve. Shadow studies for committee-sensitive applications.
Site location plan, block plan, Design & Access Statement where required.
We lodge the application with Southwark Council ourselves and pay the statutory fee directly, so the submission date never sits waiting on a payment you have to remember to make.
Every officer query, consultation response and amendment handled through to determination.
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.
Every Southwark postcode district we draw in, what the housing there mostly consists of, and which council will validate the set. The fee column carries the 2026 statutory charges, fixed nationally and payable to the authority — our drawing prices are quoted separately.
| Postcode | Area | Dominant stock | What it means for a planning drawing set |
|---|---|---|---|
| SE1 | Bermondsey / Borough / Waterloo | Georgian terraces, post-war flats, new-build | SE1 stretches across Bermondsey, Borough and Waterloo, Southwark holding most of it and Lambeth the western end. We put the address on both authorities’ maps before choosing a route. |
| SE5 | Camberwell | Georgian villas, Victorian terraces | SE5 reaches over into Lambeth at Camberwell. Which council determines a drawing set from an SE5 address depends on the street, and it is settled from the policies map before anything gets drawn. |
| SE15 | Peckham / Nunhead | Victorian terraces, post-war estates | SE15 covers Peckham and Nunhead alone. Southwark handles the drawing set, and its officers apply the SE15 conservation-area boundaries when they read it. |
| SE16 | Bermondsey / Rotherhithe | Warehouse conversions, Georgian terraces, new-build | Bermondsey and Rotherhithe sit wholly inside SE16, so Southwark validates every set submitted from there. With 43.16% of the borough’s land inside Flood Zone 3 on Environment Agency mapping, whether the address needs a Flood Risk Assessment is one of the first things checked. |
| SE17 | Walworth | Post-war estates, new-build towers | SE17 is Walworth, entirely within Southwark, determined by the council against the policies it has adopted for that part of the borough. |
| SE21 | Dulwich Village | Georgian villas, Edwardian villas (Dulwich Estate) | Dulwich Village sits on the SE21 boundary, so either Southwark or Lambeth may determine a set from it — and on top of that the Dulwich Estate scheme applies across much of the district. |
| SE22 | East Dulwich | Victorian and Edwardian terraces | An SE22 address in East Dulwich is decided by Southwark Council under its own Local Plan. That district lies wholly inside the borough, which makes it one of the simpler ones to place. |
| SE24 | Herne Hill | Victorian villas, Edwardian terraces | SE24 at Herne Hill is shared with Lambeth. A drawing set from there needs its determining council fixed first, because each authority publishes its own local validation checklist. |
Pitch, wall build-up and plot depth are rarely constant for more than a few Southwark streets together, and every variation moves what a drawing can get through at that address. So does what the house is worth: the borough’s lower quartile sale in 2025 came in at £400,000 and its upper quartile at £797,500, across 3,093 transactions in the Land Registry Price Paid record.
Conservation areas covering Southwark: Southwark Council runs 43, and Borough, Camberwell Grove, Bermondsey Street are the ones Southwark owners meet most. A planning drawing set inside a Southwark conservation area loses permitted development, so the Southwark submission is a householder application at £548 decided in 8 weeks — not a £249 prior approval decided in 6 weeks. In Bermondsey Street a planning drawing set is judged on the street elevation first.
Article 4 and your Southwark planning drawing set: Article 4 for HMOs borough-wide; additional Article 4 for office-to-residential in Bermondsey and Elephant & Castle. At a SE1 address that matters twice over, because Southwark Council applies the direction unevenly across Southwark — we read the Southwark policies map for the exact SE1 address before quoting planning drawings.
What Southwark is built from: Georgian and Regency stock around Bermondsey and Borough; Victorian terracing at Camberwell and out through Peckham; the Dulwich Estate houses; and riverside new-build. Of 149,990 dwellings in the borough, 16.9% date from 2010 or later according to VOA stock figures at 31 March 2025, a higher share of recent building than most of London carries. The Dulwich Estate’s private planning scheme affects much of SE21 and SE22 and runs alongside the council’s control rather than replacing it. That mixture decides the route far more than the postcode does, and it is the first thing a case officer here reads. A householder application costs £548 paid to Southwark Council direct, with eight weeks to a decision once validated.
Sources for this Southwark planning drawing set 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.
Southwark is upheld on appeal more often than most London councils, and that ought to change how a marginal scheme is handled. Of 141 appeal decisions on new-dwelling schemes at Southwark addresses between 2016 and 2026, 24 were allowed and 116 dismissed with 1 split — 17.0% succeeding, against 22.4% across London. Do not read that as the odds of getting permission. Everyone in an appeal population was refused first and then decided to keep going, so what the figure describes is the difficulty of overturning a Southwark refusal, not the difficulty of obtaining consent to begin with. On first decisions the borough granted 1,517 of 1,617 householder applications, 93.8% (MHCLG PS1/PS2, retrieved 1 September 2026). The risk sits with schemes that create a new home — conversions, infill, small developments — and these 141 are only the ones refused or left undetermined, never the ones approved.
Time is the cost people forget. Half of those Southwark appeals ran past 121 days from the day the appeal was lodged, and all of it falls after the council has already taken its eight or thirteen weeks. 91.5% were decided on written representations, so nobody appeared to explain the scheme: whatever the statement and the drawings said was the entire case.
141 appeal decisions on new-dwelling schemes at Southwark addresses, taken from Planning Inspectorate casework under OGL v3.0, retrieved 1 September 2026. That count is large enough to carry a percentage; the thinner casework types on this site are given as counts only.
What Southwark owners ask before instructing anybody — the fee, the route, the timetable, and what happens if the council says no — answered plainly.
Start a free quote →Our Southwark planning fee is agreed before we start and follows the route. A householder application is the shortest of them; major works, change of use and flat conversions need more drawings and more supporting documents, so they take more preparing. Southwark Council then charges its own statutory application fee on top, at rates fixed nationally rather than by the borough. Current figures are on the fees page. For scale, the median Southwark home changed hands at £540,000 during 2025, down from £560,000 the year before.
Once a submission is validated Southwark Council works to eight weeks on a householder application and thirteen on a major one. It managed 95.8% inside eight weeks on householder cases across the three financial years ending March 2026 (MHCLG PS1/PS2, retrieved 1 September 2026). Our own time from instruction to submission normally runs 3 to 4 weeks.
Yes — Southwark has Article 4 Directions in force. Article 4 for HMOs borough-wide; additional Article 4 for office-to-residential in Bermondsey and Elephant & Castle. Article 4 removes specific permitted development rights that would otherwise apply, meaning full planning permission is required where PD would normally be sufficient. We check Article 4 status for your specific property before quoting.
43 conservation areas are designated in Southwark, Camberwell Grove, Bermondsey Street and Dulwich Village among them. An application inside one is judged on its effect on the character of the area as well as on its own merits, and a Heritage Statement stops being optional.
On ordinary householder work in Southwark, a chartered architectural technologist gets you to the same place a separate planning consultant would, and usually for less — one team produces the drawings and the argument instead of two billing in parallel. Survey, drawings, submission, and every exchange with the case officer, all come from the same MCIAT-chartered people under one fee.
We cover all Southwark postcodes — SE1, SE5, SE15, SE16, SE17, SE21, SE22 — as well as the immediately adjacent boroughs. Survey appointments are available within 3 working days across Southwark.
Southwark's georgian and Regency in Bermondsey and Borough housing stock and 43 conservation areas mean that design quality matters. Southwark Council officers are experienced reviewers; well-drawn, consistent applications are processed faster than revisions-heavy ones.
Yes. Appealing to the Planning Inspectorate is a right, exercisable within 12 weeks of a Southwark refusal. Written representations run 16 to 20 weeks and a hearing 24 to 32. Worth knowing before committing to one: of 706 Southwark appeal decisions, 156 went the appellant’s way — 22.1%, which sits at the low end for London. Where a refusal turned on design or on policy rather than on a fact, we write the appeal statement and redraw the scheme to go with it.
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