Heritage Building Appraisals

Before you buy a heritage building you need to know what you're dealing with. What's the structural grid? What can you fit in? Where are the constraints and where are the opportunities? Is the north-light roof an asset or a liability? Can you get fire escape stairs on the outside without destroying the elevations?

These are the questions that kill deals or make them. And they need answering before you've committed to a purchase — not after.

With thirty years of experience working with listed buildings, conservation officers, and Historic England, I know how to read these structures. I provide rapid, fixed-fee heritage building appraisals for developers, investors, and private clients. Using remote analysis, advanced 3D massing, and historical context, I give you a definitive answer on a site's potential.

A developer asked me to look at Hallam Mill — a substantial Victorian cotton mill in Stockport, sitting in the middle of a residential area off the A6. He was considering purchasing it and needed to understand what he was buying. I'd never been to the building. I had no measured survey, no floor plans, no structural information.

Using Google Earth, Google Street View and online photography, I derived the entire structural grid of the building — column positions, bay widths, the north-light roof structure, window rhythms, access points and the relationship to the surrounding terrace rows.

No site visit. No measured survey. Just remote analysis and thirty years of knowing how to read a building.

The hand sketch came first — an isometric drawing made from the aerial photography to understand the three-dimensional form. Drawing by hand forces you to look — really look — at what a building is doing.

The structural grid — shown in red — was derived by counting window bays and cross-referencing with the aerial photography. Proposal B shows a viable office layout: individual units ranging from 213 to 904 sq ft, external steel fire escape stairs, and a central stair/lift core.

Weedon Bec is one of the most extraordinary military sites in England. The entire site is Grade II* listed. A developer asked me to assess the potential for office conversion within one of the storehouse buildings. To do that properly I needed to understand the whole site — not just the individual building. So I modelled it.

To understand a building, you sometimes have to model the world it sits in.

I built a complete 3D model of the storehouse enclosure — every building, every gable, every window and doorway — working from historic plans, aerial photography and site photographs. The model was constructed in Unreal Engine 5 and rendered to simulate a physical maquette, allowing the developer to see the site as a whole.

From the site model I developed office conversion proposals for Building 17. The proposal retains the full internal volume, introduces a mezzanine level, and adds an external fire escape stair to the gable end.

The interior visualisation shows the potential — whitewashed brick walls, exposed timber roof trusses, arched windows throwing light across timber floorboards. This is what a developer needs to see before they buy. Not just a flat technical drawing — a space they can walk into, understand, and sell.