Site Analysis

There are those who are very ambitious to act as a designer for their own project; whether this is because you love design, you don’t want to pay for an Architect, or you just want to provide your Architect with a more constructed brief. This blog series will hopefully give you some pointers on what to think about and strategies for expressing your ideas.

I will start with a disclaimer (unfortunately) - if your project needs planning or building control approval, specialist advice from an Architect or other professional consultant will be required. An Architect is worth their weight in gold for design projects such as these, and unless you’re willing to dedicate yourself to a vast learning curve of many years, along with the willingness to take on a lot of financial risk, you should consider appointing one. See our last blog which explains what an Architect can do for you.

Acting upon the statement above, this blog series will focus on the conceptual (feasibility) design stages only and will assume an Architect or architectural designer will be developing your drawings before any approval is required.

Tools you will require:

• Scale ruler

• Pencil

• Coloured pens

• Tracing paper

• 1:200 & 1:500 scale OS maps

• Sketchbook

The first stage to designing a project is to ‘look at the bigger picture’. We usually start a project by analysing the site and its wider context, by sketching over a scaled map of 1:200 or 1:500 (depending on the size of the plot). You can buy scaled OS maps from somewhere like Promap. If you can use CAD software, it’s worth getting the map to a scale of 1:1250 and scaling it up to your desired size, this is because a ‘Location Plan’ at 1:1250 will be required for a planning application. If you feel your project needs planning consent, it’s definitely worth doing it this way to avoid buying multiple maps.

Once you have your OS map, you will want to undertake a feasibility study of the site and its surroundings. During the study you will want to look at such things as:

• The sun path across the site

• Neighbouring properties and potential overlooking

• Characteristics and views you want to enhance

• Trees and over shadowing (do any of the trees have TPO’s?)

• Potential level changes

• Existing services & utilities

I’d suggest you walk around your site and its surroundings with your OS map, and using tracing paper (an Architects favourite tool), mark on any trees, level changes, overlooking windows, the sun path and any views/areas of interest. Again, if you can use a CAD program/photoshop, it’s a good idea to take a screen grab from Google Maps and overlay your traced site analysis on to the aerial photograph. The idea of this exercise is to highlight potential areas that will dictate the design of the building later on. It’s a lot easier to design once you’ve highlighted certain parameters to work within, and you will increase your chance of creating a functional proposal that is accepted by the Local Authority planning department, and your neighbours.

If it’s a complex site with lots of trees and level changes, you may be best to appoint a specialist surveyor to undertake a Topographical (land) survey, to measure the exact location of trees (and the size of their canopy), level changes and usually neighbouring property ridge heights. However, at this stage you may just want a basic design without having to pay for any specialist input, so this exercise can be done without this information. However, you may have to accept that there will be a lack of accuracy which may have a ‘knock on’ effect later down the line (this type of information will eventually be required for a detailed design).

See the sketch below as an example of what you may have when you’re finished. The site I’ve analysed is a plot my wife and I have had on eyes on for a while. It’s completely overgrown and has a dilapidated building somewhere in the middle of the growth. You will notice that I’ve ignored most of the overgrowth as it’s just shrub and will definitely be removed.

On top of your site analysis you may want to prepare a stripped back block plan (scale 1:200), this will be very handy for the next stage when we start overlaying our proposed design option.

Homework

Other areas you will want to research:

• Location of site - Conservation area, SSSI, AONB

• Restrive covenants on the site

• Tree preservations orders

• Location & access to utilities & services

• Is the site located within a flood zone?

• Are there any historic planning applications?

The above will be covered in more detail in a future blog post, so stay tuned.

Next in this series: Be your own designer Pt. 2 – Building Design