Working instrument · draft 0.1

Prescribed Pattern Book

The drawings against which a building is allowed to start in fourteen business days — or is sent back with particulars, not a vibe.

The enabling Act requires a Pattern Book within six months of designation. This brief is the first public skeleton: street types, four typologies, materials, interiors, and a refusal list. A site-specific book will name the brick, the stone, and the first blocks. It should not invent a fifth way of avoiding a street.

Worked draft. Not a planning permission and not an adopted code. Dimensions are here so they can be replaced with better ones. A proposal that only says “more variety” or “less height” without a replacement envelope is not an amendment. It is an objection without Forced Construction.

The fourteen-day rule

A person proposing development that conforms in all material respects with this Book lodges a Certificate of Conformance with the Master Architect: drawings of the street wall, the plan, the materials, and a statement that the plot sits on an adopted street type.

If the Master Architect does not issue a written notice of non-conformance specifying the particulars of divergence within fourteen business days, the Certificate is deemed approved and works may start. Silence is consent. A late aesthetic preference is not a notice.

A notice must name the clause. “Out of keeping” is not a clause. Challenges go to the Arbitral Tribunal, not to a new committee.

Street types

Every plot is on one adopted street type. Height follows the street, not the ambition of the plot. Mixed types on one frontage are a new street, and a new street is a Civic Jury question.

Primary street

18–22 m building-to-building · 4 storeys + set-back mansard

Active ground floor. Shops, workshops, surgeries, and halls. Continuous frontage. Servicing from the rear or a side lane.

Residential street

12–16 m building-to-building · 2–3 storeys + habitable attic

Terraces or short perimeter sides. Front doors on the street. Small front area or rail, garden behind.

Mews or lane

8–10 m · 2 storeys

Workshops, small dwellings, and rear access. Shared surface. No through heavy goods.

Green or close

Building line set to the adopted plan · As the facing street type

Play, trees, and the hall. Cars stay off the green. A closed green for more than fourteen days is a Covenant failure.

Typologies

Four types cover a walkable borough that can still make things. Guiting kept cottages by modernising the inside and leaving the street face. The same rule, at block scale: change the services, do not invent a new kind of object.

T1 · Terrace house

Plot. Frontage 4.5–6.0 m. Depth 9–12 m of private garden behind.

Envelope. Two or three storeys plus attic within the eaves line of the street. Party walls. Ridge parallel to the street unless the adopted plan shows a gable.

Use. One household, or a house plus a single workroom on the ground floor with its own street door.

T2 · Perimeter block

Plot. A full street block with a shared courtyard. No tower on a podium.

Envelope. Three to five storeys. The fifth storey is set back not less than 2 m from the street wall. Courtyard receives daylight on the December solstice at courtyard floor.

Use. Stacked flats and maisonettes. Ground floor on a primary street is commercial or civic. Amenity Trust dwellings are mixed through the block, not grouped as a separate wing.

T3 · Workshop-house

Plot. Frontage 5.5–8.0 m on a primary street or mews.

Envelope. Two or three storeys. Ground floor 3.2 m clear to soffit. Wide door or folding front for making, repair, or sale.

Use. Work on the ground floor; dwelling above for the same household or a Trust tenancy. Not a dark warehouse with a flat bolted on.

T4 · Civic room

Plot. Hall, first school, chapel, or surgery on a green or primary street.

Envelope. Height may exceed the facing street by one storey if the extra height is a single public room, not extra flats.

Use. Public or charitable. Disposal locked by Covenant Article 7.4.

Materials

  • •Wall: local brick, local stone, or lime-rendered masonry as the Master Architect’s first material note for that Charter Area. A later area may name a different vernacular. It may not name a generic panel system as the default wall.
  • •Timber: structural or cladding mass-timber is permitted where it meets the fire and moisture table. It must still read as a building with openings, not as a crate.
  • •Roof: pitched tile, slate, or metal standing-seam on a pitch of not less than 35 degrees, or a hidden pitch behind a parapet on T2 only.
  • •Openings: taller than they are wide on street elevations, with a revealed depth of not less than 100 mm. Floor-to-ceiling glass as the majority of a street wall is non-conforming.
  • •Colour: a published palette of not more than eight external colours plus unpainted masonry. Fluorescent coatings and large applied graphics on a street wall are non-conforming.

Inside the building

  • •Habitable rooms: 2.5 m clear floor-to-ceiling. 2.3 m is allowed only in a storey within the roof.
  • •Primary-street ground floor: 3.2 m clear.
  • •Party walls and floors between dwellings: the published sound table, tested on the first plot of each type.
  • •Every dwelling of two bedrooms or more has private outdoor space — a garden, a gallery, or a balcony of not less than 5 m² that is not a corridor.
  • •Open space: not less than 15 percent of each residential block, counting courtyard, play, and adopted green, not counting car park.

Refused without a Jury

These are particulars of non-conformance. They do not need a policy debate. They need a different drawing, or an amendment of the Book under Forced Construction.

  • •A slab podium with a tower, or any building whose street wall is less than 60 percent of its greatest height.
  • •A surface car park or a blank service deck on a primary-street frontage.
  • •A blank ground-floor elevation longer than 8 m on a primary street, except a substation or a specified workshop door.
  • •A dwelling whose only outdoor space is a corridor or a lightwell.
  • •Curtain walling as the majority of any street elevation.
  • •A typology that is not T1–T4 and has not been added to the Book by the Article 13 path.
  • •A visitor-let layout that would breach Covenant Article 8.4 by design (lock-boxes, hotel corridors, no private outdoor space).

Cars, bins, and pipes

Parking for a T1 house is on-plot at the rear or in a mews, not in a front hardstanding that eats the street wall. A T2 block may have a single undercroft access from a lane; the undercroft may not become the elevation.

Bins are collected from a designated point that is not the primary footway. Service corridors required by the Act sit in the adopted plan, not as an afterthought across a neighbour’s garden.

Changing the Book

Raising a standard (quieter floors, deeper reveals, more Trust dwellings in a block) can be done by the Court with the Master Architect.

Lowering a height cap, adding a fifth typology, or shrinking the open-space quota is a change of principle. It needs the Civic Jury and a Forced Construction package: the replacement envelope, the homes still delivered, the street type still held.

“Let the market decide the form” is not a package. It is a request to stop having a Book.

Read with Covenant Article 6, the enabling Act, and the Guiting pattern.