Where's the garage?

After more than two years of planning, counter-planning, submitting, withdrawing, and re-submitting plans, we have broken ground on extending the house. Things I have learned so far:

• Anyone can pretend to be an architect. Most extensions are as formulaic as the usual domestic architecture of British cities, so it is possible to regurgitate the same old “we'll stick a box on the side of this larger box” and make a living as glorified draftsman. But our relatively unusual building (called a “chalet”, with not a hint of irony) and a plot that is trapezoid, rather than the usual rectangular strip, called the first “architect's” bluff. Quite simply, it would have been impossible to translate the elevations and projections to a three-dimensional object where walls met rooflines according to the plans.
• The local Council's regulations are driven by the imperative to protect against stupidity and folly, rather than promote excellence. (And the planning officer missed the point that the building they were approving was drafted by M. C. Escher.)
• The good architects who understand the planning of volumes, and have an appreciation of local particularities, do not have any extra letters after their name (something like FPAG for “Fellow of Proper Architects' Guild”, or something like that). The right recommendation is well worth a 30-year old Macallan…
• The planning and building regulations process may ensure that what you build will be inoffensive to your neighbours and will still be up come a flood or other natural disaster, but environmental considerations effectively stretch as far as “insulation all around” and the tighter controls of what kind of boiler you can install. At no point did anyone mention something like “have you considered adding solar water heating to your specs? no? here's leaflet, read this and we'll follow up with some suggestions”. Similarly, no pointers to grey water use, recycling of rainwater, solar or wind options for power generation.
• Extending is [much] cheaper than moving house. Spacious family houses in our neighbourhood (read: catchment area of probably the best primary and secondary comprehensive schools for a few miles around) go for silly money, if you can find them. Once you're in the right catchment area, you don't move.

I suspect that the hugely popular enterprise of extending one's property is an English, rather then British phenomenon – probably even just a Southern affair. The distribution of the population on the British islands is as if someone picked the whole lot up and shook everything to the bottom. And the strict planning controls, together with the relatively strong protection of greenfield areas, have increased the pressure on upping the density of occupation within the existing urban boundaries. Old petrol stations, yards, and the non-spaces between industrial estates are all developed for “middle-density” occupation: two- or three-storey buildings with flats, or a mix of houses with alarmingly small gardens. The same seems to happen with “excessively” large domestic plots, which might be chopped up, or the original building demolished to make way for three houses. But, not surprisingly, people prefer to live in older houses: larger plots, higher ceilings, and walls made of real bricks, rather than plasterboard (so you can hang a bookcase off them!). Flats and newer houses end up driving the impressive mobility in England (the usual figure bandied about is that households move on average every seven years), just s the dearth of older properties in desirable locations inflates the prices for premium property, dragging everything along for the ride.

In all this, the importance of the link between the quality of education and the housing market is consistently sidestepped by the government. Through their numbers, disposable income, and inelastic demand for quality education, aspiring parents drive the housing market like no other section of the population. A huge amount of nonsense about “parental choice on which school to send their kids” is bandied about to obfuscate the significant gap in achievement one may find even in adjacent schools, but it is blindingly obvious that the only reason parents will want to “chose schools” is if the one closest to home is not perceived to be good. Cue the postcode lottery in every conurbation with more than one school – and people ripping down their garages to build those extra rooms.