A kitchen extension in Greenwich is best understood as a room rather than a footprint: the garden-facing diner at the back of the house, where cooking, eating and daily living are pulled together. That framing changes the brief. On the Georgian terraces near the town centre and Croom's Hill the rear plot is often shallow and the useful move is a modest single-storey addition that borrows light from the garden; on the Victorian and Italianate villas around Maze Hill and Westcombe Park the generous gardens allow a fuller kitchen-dining space. Before any of that, tenure decides what is possible — a whole house behaves very differently from a converted period flat within a larger historic house, where the rear you want to build into may not be wholly yours, and where a freeholder's consent may sit in front of the whole scheme. We establish what you own, what the rear elevation faces and how the existing plan flows before proposing where the new kitchen should sit, because those answers set the boundaries of a realistic design.
The cooking function is what separates a kitchen extension from a general rear extension, and the extract is where it starts. A ducted hood over a hob has to terminate somewhere on the building, and on a Greenwich rear elevation that terminal, its flue and any external condenser are visible alterations judged within the World Heritage and conservation-area setting — not incidental fittings. The duct itself needs a route with enough straight length and few enough bends to move air at the rate the building regulations expect, and a ceiling void deep enough to carry it alongside the new structure. We fix the terminal position and the duct run first, then draw the kitchen around them, so cooking, ventilation and appearance are resolved together.
The garden-facing rear elevation is the heart of the scheme and the part most exposed to scrutiny. A kitchen-diner wants light and a connection to the garden, which pulls toward glazed doors, a full-height rear screen and rooflights over the deeper plan. In Greenwich none of that is assumed acceptable: the proportion of glazing, the framing, the roof form above it and any change to existing window openings are tested against how the rear reads within the conservation area and, where the property is near the town centre or river, the setting of the World Heritage Site. We design the glazing and doors to sit quietly against the host elevation and carry the case in the drawings, because a rear that would pass unremarked elsewhere is examined here. That usually means keeping the addition subordinate to the original house, choosing framing and materials that respond to the period fabric rather than compete with it, and resolving how a rooflit flat roof or a shallow pitch meets the retained rear wall so the historic elevation stays legible above and behind the new glass.
Drainage quietly decides where the sink and the island can go. Moving a kitchen to the rear means moving its foul waste, and a kitchen waste run needs continuous fall to a connection that can take it. In a whole house with garden behind, that is usually a matter of setting invert levels and the gully or stack position before the floor build-up is fixed. In a converted period flat it is a different problem: the existing stack is often shared with the homes above and below, the connection you want may not exist within your demise, and altering a shared stack needs the freeholder's consent as well as the neighbours' tolerance. Where levels genuinely rule out a gravity run a pumped waste is possible, but it should be a considered decision taken early rather than a late rescue once the floor is poured. We establish what the drainage will physically accept — the available fall, the connection point and, in a flat, who owns the stack — before committing to where the sink, the dishwasher and the island go.
Then the structure. Opening the rear wall for a kitchen extension usually means a beam carrying the floors above, designed and calculated by a structural engineer, and in a converted period flat a load path that runs down through somebody else's home — a coordination and consent question as much as an engineering one. Foundations close to the boundary bring the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 into play, with notices that run separately from the planning decision and should be programmed early. Where the new rear elevation carries a large area of glazing, the distance to the boundary also governs how much unprotected glass the building regulations allow, so a fully glazed kitchen wall is not automatically available and is far better tested at sketch stage. On the terraces the beam commonly bears into the party walls on either side, so notices reach neighbours to both sides; on the villas with more room around them the structural interfaces can be simpler, but the excavation for new foundations still needs checking against the three and six metre triggers before work begins.
The consent route follows from all of that. Permitted development rights are frequently restricted in Greenwich and an Article 4 Direction may apply, so most kitchen extensions here are designed for a full householder application, determined in around eight weeks once validated. Where the house is listed, listed building consent runs alongside and covers internal changes and the extract routing, not just the new elevation. Even on an unlisted home the World Heritage and conservation-area setting is assessed. We survey the house, test the extract, drainage and structure against the constraints, prepare the planning drawings and any heritage material, then produce the building regulations package. No architect can guarantee a Greenwich decision; the aim is to remove the reasons for a refusal.
