We wrote the communal strategy from first principles and then applied it identically across all three blocks, so the client now holds it as a standard rather than as a one-off for this site.
The full story
Bromford came to us in June 2025 holding a planning application, not a planning permission. It had been validated in June 2021, it had been to committee, and it was still undecided. The design that had got it that far belonged to another team, and it was a planning design: enough to describe seventy homes to a council, nowhere near enough to build them.
The instruction was to start anyway. Take the inherited information, resolve it into a construction set, and be finished before the decision lands. That is an unusual amount of faith to place in an outcome nobody controls, and it changes what the architect is for. There is no planning application to win here. There is only the question of whether, on the day the notice arrives, the client can build.
The first job was to make the legacy information usable. A planning layout carries plots and roofs; it does not carry a coordinated set of levels, drainage runs, retaining structures, boundary types and plot references that a structural engineer and a civils team can both work to without contradicting each other. We rebuilt it into one cross-referenced general arrangement and issued the first version in October 2025.
Then the house types. Fourteen types and variants, from one-bedroom apartments to a four-bedroom detached house, each drawn as a full pack: elevations, sections, substructure, floor plans with setting out, joist zones, services layouts, roof plans, kitchen and bathroom details, canopies and a fire strategy, with a window schedule and a door schedule keyed to it. Then the same information again plot by plot, seventy times, because a plot is a type plus a handing plus a tenure plus a set of levels, and a contractor builds plots rather than types.
The apartment blocks were the real gap. Three blocks of six one-bedroom social-rent flats, three storeys each, and no standing client specification for any of it. Everything a house does not have had to be decided from first principles: the door entry system, smoke ventilation to the landings, fire-rated communal doors and ironmongery, emergency lighting, communal heating, signage, and the cladding fire questions that follow any three-storey residential block. We settled it once and applied it to all three, which is what turns a one-off answer into something the client can reuse.
Compliance ran alongside all of it. Six ground-floor apartments to the optional accessible standard, with level access designed into the threshold rather than added as a ramp. Part O overheating, and the SAP and photovoltaic coordination across every plot. Acoustic glazing and ventilation set by the site's own noise assessment. A materials schedule covering all seventy plots, brick by brick and tile by tile, and a full set of NHBC technical conditions worked through with the warranty provider.
Full planning permission was granted on 27 February 2026, with thirty-five conditions attached. By then the technical design was substantially issued, and the discharge applications went in within days. We have produced the architectural information those discharges are built on, including the construction environmental management plan, and the conditions have been clearing through 2026.
We also drafted the conveyance information once the layout was frozen: a master plan and an individual deed plan for every plot, forty-five drawings, issued in December 2025 and updated in January 2026. It is not glamorous work and it is exactly the kind of thing that holds up a first sale if nobody has done it. As Principal Designer under CDM 2015 we produced the pre-construction information, and we are still on the project: the current information issue is dated August 2026, and our concept design for the next phase went to the client in February.
