Fairlawns 59 Limited

A first sheet is built up in layers, and each layer only makes sense once the one under it is fixed. The outline of the land comes first, because it is the only part of the drawing that somebody else has already decided. The subdivisions come second, because the number of plots is an argument the layout has to win rather than a figure set at the start. The access and the drainage come last on the sheet and first in the risk, because they are the two things that can make every line above them worthless.

Read the diagram from the bottom edge upward and you are reading the questions in the order a buyer should ask them. Where does a vehicle turn in, and can the ground each side of that entrance be kept clear. Where does foul drainage go, and if it goes to a plant, where is the land that takes the treated discharge. Only once those two are answered does the number of plots above them mean anything at all.

Next: what I take on, and where I stop

The work is site acquisition and delivery, not construction. I look for small parcels — an infill plot in a village, a paddock with a frontage, a yard behind a terrace — and test whether a buildable scheme exists before money moves. From there I run the planning route, commission the technical design, and put the trades on in the order the build needs.

Bricklaying, groundworks, roofing and first fix are all done by tradespeople I appoint. My part is the sequence: the drawing a trade is handed is the current one, the condition covering their work is discharged, and the trade before them has finished the surface they rely on.

The size of scheme sets the shape of everything else. A pair of houses behind a frontage can be run off a hand-written schedule and a fortnightly walk; anything much beyond that needs a structure I have deliberately not built. So the upper limit is the point at which coordination stops being something one person can hold in their head, and I would rather turn a site down than find that limit halfway through a build.

Next: walking a site, access first

I look at access before anything else, because a site with no achievable splay is not a site. A splay is the triangle of clear visibility a driver needs pulling out of a new entrance; if the land keeping it clear belongs to a neighbour, the scheme carries a problem good design will not solve.

Services come second. I trace the foul route on the ground and not on a plan, because a manhole in a neighbour’s garden is a wayleave conversation and a rising main under the only driveway is a cost I want priced before I bid.

Ground and boundaries come last in the walk and first in the risk register: Cornwall gives shallow rock in one field and made ground in the next, and I read boundaries against the title plan with a tape, because hedges move and deeds do not.

Next: opening a Cornish hedge

Almost every frontage I look at in this part of the county is a Cornish hedge, and an entrance means taking a length of one out. That single fact shapes more first meetings than any planning policy does, because a hedge is a structure, a habitat and a boundary at once, and it is the thing a neighbour notices before the houses exist.

The batter matters because it is what makes a dry-built face stand up: each course sits slightly behind the one below, so the whole face leans into the earth core and locks itself together. Take a length out with a machine and the two cut ends are left square and unstable, which is why a hedge is opened by hand back to a point where the face can be turned and closed.

What comes out is usually rebuilt, and rebuilt close by: the stone is set aside, the earth is kept, and the same material goes back into a new end or a new length beside the entrance. By the time an application is drawn I want that detail on the sheet, because a hedge shown simply as a gap in a red line is the kind of omission an officer will ask about and a neighbour will remember.

Next: what has to be true before I make an offer

An offer goes in when four things hold at once: an access I can build and keep clear; a foul drainage answer, either a mains connection with capacity or a treatment plant with somewhere lawful to discharge; a policy position that gives the scheme a fair hearing; and a gross-to-net that survives the constraints.

On a small Cornish plot that last figure is why two sites of the same acreage carry a very different number of houses, because roads, splays, drainage, garden depths and root protection zones all come out of the gross before anything is drawn.

Where one of the four is unresolved I still offer, but the offer says so on its face and is conditional on the answer arriving, because an unconditional bid on an unanswered question is how a developer ends up owning a field.

Next: what each constraint pulls along behind it

Long before a layout exists, the question at the gate is how many plots a field can hold, and the honest answer is arithmetic rather than judgement. Take the gross area, take out the proportion that roads, splays, drainage and buffers will swallow, divide what is left by the size of plot the place is likely to want, and round down, because a plot never rounds up.

Conversions are exact to the figures shown and nothing in the table depends on the site. It earns its place here because the first misunderstanding in almost every land conversation is a unit rather than a number, and an acre described as roughly half a hectare has already cost somebody two plots.

Next: the order the trades come on

The sequence is a dependency chain, and each trade needs something finished by the one in front. Groundworkers strip, dig and pour, and need the setting-out, the drainage design and the conditions covering access and archaeology discharged. Bricklayers need a level, cured deck with the damp-proof course detail agreed.

Carpenters follow onto the wall plate; roofers need that structure signed off; scaffolders bracket the whole of it and have to be told the roof line before they build the lift. First fix electrical and plumbing go in against a fixed layout, because a socket moved after plastering is a chased wall.

My job through that is coordination and inspection: booking each trade against a realistic date for the one before, walking the work before it is covered up, and holding the building control inspections the notice requires. Where a trade waits on a detail from a consultant, chasing it is mine.

Next: schemes in south-east Cornwall

The ground I work is the south-east corner of the county: the Looe and Liskeard hinterland, the Seaton valley, and the villages between. Schemes here are small by definition — a dwelling on an infill plot, a pair of houses behind a frontage, a handful on a former yard — and the constraints described above are the ordinary condition of that ground.

Live schemes sit at the stages set out across these sheets: some are still being walked and tested, some are inside the planning route, some are past consent. I will talk through what is running with anyone who has reason to ask.

• Where it is, as a postcode or a nearest address, and the title number if you have it.
• Roughly how big, in whichever unit you were given it in, and whether that figure came off a deed or off a listing.
• What the frontage does — whether there is an existing entrance, and what the hedge or wall along it is made of.
• Whether mains foul drainage is within reach, or whether the nearest connection is a field away.
• Anything already refused, granted or withdrawn on that land, with the reference if you have it.

Send any of that to projects@fairlawns59.work and I will read it myself and answer it myself. If the site is one I would not take on, I will say which of the four tests it fails and why, because a clear no is worth more to a landowner than a slow maybe.

Next sheet: through planning, from pre-application to discharge