Heating Engineers in Gerrards Cross

A suburb with a start date

Buckinghamshire County Council's historic assessment of the town, written with South Bucks District Council's support in 2009, says that between the late eighteenth century and the railway's arrival in 1906 Gerrards Cross was called the Brighton of Bucks. After 1906 it grew quickly into a Metro-land commuter town with extensive private housing estates aimed at London's upper-middle class, a garden suburb of large Arts and Crafts houses with spacious gardens. It divides the building into three phases: 1905 to 1920, 1920 to 1939, and everything since. South Park was laid out in 1906 and the Latchmoor Estate in 1907. The assessment says most houses built between about 1908 and 1915 were designed by renowned architects in a style with timber-beamed gables sometimes called Tudorbethan. One of them, Chiltern House on The Woodlands, built in 1907, is Grade II.

The figures still show it. In the Census area covering the town, which also includes 32 Denham postcodes, 63.2% of households live in detached houses and only 8.6% in semis, the lowest semi share of the five towns we work in. 77.2% own their home. Of 3,720 properties, 250 date from 1900 to 1918, 410 from the 1930s, 630 from 1955 to 1964 and roughly a quarter from 2000 onward, which is the infill. Council tax is unusually high: 1,700 properties are in band G and 780 in band H, and about three in four are in bands F to H. Private renting at 20.2% in the wider ward matches the national rate, the highest of the five.

Flues and the two conservation areas

The town has two conservation areas: Gerrards Cross Common, first designated in 1987 and re-designated in April 2009, and the Centenary area, the Garden Village, designated in April 2009. The appraisal for both was written by South Bucks District Council. It lists obtrusive flues and vents as a negative feature on the Common, and notes numerous pipes and flues as an unsympathetic alteration in the Garden Village. It also names chimneys among the threats to the Garden Village's character, alongside uPVC windows and doors.

This is the only one of our five Buckinghamshire towns where a council document says so outright. The leaflet for residents at the back of the 2009 appraisal says that in a conservation area planning permission is needed for chimneys, flues, soil and vent pipes on a principal or side elevation fronting a highway, and adds that a public footpath counts as a highway. It is a legacy document and describes the rules of its day. The current national rule says the same in substance for a house: a flue on a wall or roof slope that fronts a highway and forms the principal or side elevation needs planning permission, and a flue at the back normally does not. Flats and maisonettes have no permitted development rights at all. Buckinghamshire Council publishes no flue wording of its own now, and there is no Article 4 direction covering the town on its current list of ten.

The town is not in the Chilterns National Landscape. The neighbourhood plan says Gerrards Cross is in close proximity to it, not inside it, and an indicative postcode test puts the town about three kilometres outside.

A flood record that is mostly about a motorway

Next door in Chalfont St Peter the council has written three flood reports. In Gerrards Cross it has written one, and it is about the M25. On 7 February 2014 blocked, silted ditches could not carry away the water from 20 millimetres of overnight rain, and three of the motorway's four lanes closed. The report records no earlier flood at that location and treats it as a highway drainage failure. The council's older flood assessment, from 2018, puts the Misbourne along the town's eastern boundary, with several properties and land in Flood Zone 3a, and an undated 2011 list names roads including Packhorse Road and Oak End Way, where the entry mentions springs and sewer problems, as known flooding sites. We found no recent council record of groundwater or sewer flooding in the town.

A Gerrards Cross boiler is not usually part of a flood story, and we would rather say so than invent one.

Who does the work

Andrew Millward has been at it for forty years, is a Heat Geek Elitist and is Viessmann accredited. Elis Harizi does all of our bathroom work. We will fit whichever make suits the house, and Viessmann is the one we reach for first.