Planning drawings near me: what a London set contains

What is actually in a planning drawing set?

A compliant householder set for a London borough is seven drawings, and each one exists to answer a question the case officer is required to ask. Missing any of them is the difference between an eight-week decision and a validation email three weeks after you thought you had submitted.

• Site location plan, 1:1250 — the application site edged red, other land in the same ownership edged blue, at least two named roads visible, north point, scale bar, and sourced from a licensed Ordnance Survey supplier.
• Block or site plan, 1:500 or 1:200 — boundaries, the existing building footprint, the proposal, hardstanding, trees and the relationship to adjoining properties.
• Existing floor plans, 1:100 or 1:50 — every affected storey as built, room by room, with dimensions taken from a measured survey rather than from a sales particular.
• Proposed floor plans, matching scale — the same storeys as altered, with new walls, openings, structure and use of each room labelled.
• Existing elevations, all affected faces — typically front, rear and both flanks, showing the neighbouring properties either side so the officer can judge the proposal in context.
• Proposed elevations, matching scale — materials annotated, window and door positions dimensioned, ridge and eaves heights given as levels.
• Section, 1:50 or 1:100 — cut through the part of the building that changes in height, showing floor-to-ceiling dimensions, roof pitch and the relationship to ground level.

Which scales and annotations do councils insist on?

Scale is not a stylistic choice. Councils publish required scales because officers measure off the drawings, and a set at an unstated or non-standard scale cannot be measured. Every sheet needs the same six pieces of information in the title block.

The scale bar matters more than the stated scale. A drawing issued at 1:100 on A1 and then printed to A3 by the council is no longer at 1:100, but a scale bar rescales with the sheet and stays true. Officers routinely reject sets that state a ratio without drawing a bar.

Drawing numbers and revision letters are the other quiet failure. When you amend a drawing during the eight weeks — and most applications amend at least once — the council needs to be able to identify which version the decision notice approves. An approved plans condition referencing an unnumbered drawing is unenforceable, and building control will later ask you to prove what was permitted.

Why does a measured survey come before any drawing?

Because the existing drawings are evidence, not decoration. The officer compares your existing elevation against the council’s own aerial photography, street-level imagery and planning history for the address. If your drawing shows a rear elevation that never existed — a common outcome when a set is traced from an estate agent’s floorplan — the whole submission loses credibility, and any permission granted on inaccurate plans is vulnerable.

A measured survey on a typical London terrace takes two to three hours with a laser distance meter. We record external dimensions and levels, internal room sizes and wall thicknesses, window and door positions and reveal depths, floor-to-ceiling heights on every storey, ridge and eaves heights, the roof pitch, and the position of any boundary, tree or outbuilding that will feature on the block plan.

The survey is also what makes the drawings reusable. The same accurate existing model carries forward into the building regulations set, into the structural engineer’s calculations, and into the party wall surveyor’s schedule of condition. Redrawing from scratch at each stage is where a fragmented appointment quietly costs more than a single fixed fee.

What gets a drawing set rejected at validation?

In our experience across the 33 boroughs, validation failures cluster into six causes, and five of the six are avoidable at zero cost by drawing the set correctly the first time.

• Unlicensed mapping — a location plan taken from a consumer mapping website rather than a licensed Ordnance Survey reseller. This is a copyright issue and councils are strict about it.
• No scale bar — the ratio is stated but no bar is drawn, so the officer cannot verify dimensions on a resized print.
• Missing neighbouring context — elevations that stop at the party wall, leaving the officer unable to judge the proposal against the adjoining roofline or window positions.
• Existing and proposed not paired — a proposed elevation with no existing counterpart at the same scale, so the change cannot be read.
• CIL form omitted — the Community Infrastructure Levy Additional Information form is required in the London boroughs that charge CIL even when the liability is nil.
• Ownership certificate wrong — Certificate A signed where the applicant is not the sole freeholder, common on leasehold flats and shared-freehold conversions, where notice must be served and Certificate B used.

None of these is a design judgement. They are administrative, and they are why a set that looks perfectly reasonable to the person who commissioned it can still sit unvalidated for a month.

What files do you receive at the end?

Every project is issued as a full set of PDFs at the stated scale, sized for the sheet the council expect, plus the editable CAD source. You own both outright. There is no licence restriction on reusing the drawings with a different builder, engineer or approved inspector, and no charge for reissuing them later.

Files stay available in your client portal alongside the application reference, the correspondence, and the decision notice when it lands. That single archive is what your solicitor will ask for at sale, typically five or ten years later, when the question is whether the extension was built as approved.

Where the project proceeds to construction we issue the building regulations set from the same base model: general arrangement plans, construction sections, structural layouts coordinated with the engineer’s calculations, and the drainage and insulation detail the approver needs. Continuity between the two sets is the reason the combined Complete package at £1,750 is cheaper than commissioning each stage separately.

Common questions about planning drawing sets