Replacement windows in Hartfield, in and around the conservation area

Hartfield is a village and large parish in Wealden District, East Sussex, where the B2110 and the B2026 meet on the northern edge of Ashdown Forest. The parish also takes in Colemans Hatch, Hammerwood and Holtye. Planning here goes to Wealden District Council, the same council as Forest Row.

The conservation area

The centre of the village is a conservation area of about 16 hectares holding 24 listed buildings. St Mary the Virgin, with its thirteenth-century nave and fifteenth-century shingled spire, is the oldest of them. Popes Cottage, reputedly a hall house of 1236, is said to be the oldest house. Most of the listed buildings stand on Church Street and the High Street.

Wealden's only Article 4 direction is in Rotherfield, so in Hartfield an unlisted house in the conservation area can usually change its windows without planning permission if the new ones look similar. In practice that means flush casements in the same pattern of panes and a colour close to the old paint. A listed cottage needs listed building consent, and timber casements are what that consent normally asks for.

Around the parish

Outside the village, houses are scattered and often large. A. A. Milne lived at Cotchford Farm, and Hammerwood Park, built in 1792 as Benjamin Latrobe's first work, is listed Grade I. The old railway line closed in 1967 and is now the Forest Way. Much of the parish is in the High Weald National Landscape, which does not change the window rules for a house.

Fitting on a narrow street

The village street is narrow and parking is tight, which affects how a fitting day runs. Your surveyor will ask where a vehicle can stop and whether a scaffold tower can stand on the pavement or needs to go at the back.

Read more on Wikipedia.