Heating Engineers in Oxhey

A suburb with a purchase date

Watford Borough Council's character appraisal for the Oxhey conservation area, adopted in July 2014, tells the story plainly. The land was farmland until the railway arrived. Bushey and Oxhey station opened in 1841, and the current entrance buildings date from around 1912. After the British Land Company bought Chalk Hill Farm in 1856, the area built up rapidly, and by the time the 1871 Ordnance Survey map was published much of it had been developed. The appraisal says the vast majority of the buildings in the conservation area went up within a 15 year timeframe in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The area was known as New Bushey until 1882, when Watford's board of health took it over, and by 1914 the map calls it Oxhey. Seven pubs were built in the same boom.

The dominant form, the appraisal says, is two storey brick buildings with pitched roofs, mostly yellow London stocks with red brick for decoration, and brick chimneys are common, as are wooden doors and sliding sash windows. Later building filled the gaps: Hillside Crescent in 1923, Amberley Terrace in 1933, and former nursery sites on the Paddock Roads in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Chimneys, flues and Watford's conservation area

The Oxhey conservation area was designated on 18 February 2013. The council's appraisal lists the removal of original chimneys, windows, doors, shopfronts and other detailing, and new cladding, porches and satellite dishes, as the changes that harm it. It describes brick chimneys as common.

Watford has made Article 4 directions on named properties in the area. A direction of 4 April 2013 for residential frontages on Aldenham Road, Capel Road, Caroline Place, Chalk Hill, the Paddock Roads, Pinner Road and Villiers Road takes away permitted development rights for enlargements and other alterations, for changes to the roof where it faces the street, for porches, for gates, fences and walls, and for painting the exterior. Two other directions, covering pubs and commercial buildings, remove the painting right alone. The right to install, alter or replace a chimney, flue or soil and vent pipe is not among the classes withdrawn, and a boiler replaced inside a house is not development at all.

Watford's conservation areas plan sets out the ordinary rule: a chimney, flue or soil and vent pipe on a dwelling needs planning permission in a conservation area where it fronts a highway and is on the principal or side elevation. A flue out of the back is a different matter. Because the directions apply to named properties, neighbours can be under different rules, so we check the address and not just the street.

The other problem is the chimney itself. Historic England's advice is that not every chimney can accept a new flue liner, because flues in traditional buildings can be narrow, contorted or distorted by years of movement, and forcing a flexible liner down one risks damaging historic fabric. In brick terraces of this age that is worth settling before the boiler is chosen.

The conservation area has no nationally listed buildings of its own. Watford's appraisal notes that 14 Chalk Hill, a Grade II former farmhouse, stands close to its northern boundary. The Church of St Matthew on Eastbury Road, built in 1880, and the Bushey Arches railway viaduct are Grade II, and Watford's 2014 list of nationally listed buildings places both in its Oxhey ward. The council's 2010 local list files 31 entries under Oxhey, though that includes Watford Heath, Bushey Station and a handful of railway structures, so it is not 31 buildings in the village.

Water: very hard

Affinity Water supplies the area. Its own postcode lookup put 173 of the 178 WD19 postcodes we sampled in the zone called Northwood, where the 2025 report gives total hardness of 348 mg/l from one sample. Affinity's published scale runs soft to 75, moderately hard to 150, hard to 300 and very hard above that. The five exceptions were Holywell-ward postcodes, in the Watford South zone at 353, also very hard. The zones cut across streets, so Affinity's checker is the way to know your own address. Scale forms wherever the water is heated, and on a new installation scale protection is worth discussing.

Who does the work

Andrew Millward has forty years in the trade, is a Heat Geek Elitist and is Viessmann accredited. Elis Harizi does all of our bathroom work. We fit and service whichever make of boiler suits the house.