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.

I provide rapid heritage building appraisals for developers, investors and private clients considering the acquisition of listed and historic buildings. Using a combination of remote analysis, measured survey, hand drawing and advanced 3D visualisation, I can assess a building's development potential and present viable options — often before a single site visit has taken place.

Thirty years of working with listed buildings, conservation officers and Historic England has taught me how to read these structures. I trained at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and I've worked with David Chipperfield and Michael Wilford. I know what's possible and I have a good idea of what planners expect.

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. From this I produced a full site plan, existing floor plans and two development proposals for office conversion.

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: the main multi-storey block, the single-storey weaving sheds with their north-light roof, the chimney, and how the building sits within its tight domestic context. Drawing by hand forces you to look — really look — at what a building is doing.

The location plan establishes the fundamentals: access is from Hallam Street off the A6, the mill is bounded by Victorian terrace rows on three sides, and the chimney anchors the north-east corner. Understanding this relationship between mill and neighbourhood is critical — it determines where you can place fire escapes, where servicing happens, and how the building breathes within its context.

The structural grid — shown in red — was derived by counting window bays and cross-referencing with the aerial photography. Two windows per structural bay on the longer elevations, one window per bay on the shorter. This gives you the column positions, and from the column positions you get the spatial logic of the entire building.

Proposal B shows a viable office layout: individual units ranging from 213 to 904 sq ft, external steel fire escape stairs on both flanks, a central stair and lift core, shared toilet facilities, and a new external lightwell created by removing a section of the north-light roof — bringing daylight into the deep plan where the weaving sheds meet the main block.

A bridge links the two halves of the building across the lightwell. The structural wall marking the old gable — where the original mill was extended — becomes a legible threshold rather than a hidden join.

Weedon Bec is one of the most extraordinary military sites in England. Built from 1803 as a strategic ordnance depot during the Napoleonic Wars, the complex was designed to store weapons and ammunition far enough inland to survive a coastal invasion — connected to London by the Grand Junction Canal. The entire site is Grade II* listed: twelve storehouses arranged in two symmetrical rows flanking a central canal basin, with barracks, a magazine compound, and boundary walls.

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.

The aerial photograph shows what two hundred years of incremental change looks like — the original Regency planning still legible beneath the overlay of later additions, modern housing to the west, and light industrial use that has kept the buildings alive but done little to celebrate their significance.

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

The canal basin is the spine of the site — weapons and munitions were brought in by barge and stored in the flanking storehouses. This relationship between water, landscape and architecture is central to the significance of the place. Any conversion strategy has to work with it, not against it.

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 before committing to any individual building.

The individual storehouses are simple, powerful buildings — high-ceilinged single volumes with repetitive gable forms, arched window openings, and a structural rhythm defined by cast iron columns supporting wrought iron roof trusses. The quality of the ironwork and the scale of the internal spaces make these buildings exceptionally suited to conversion.

From the site model I developed office conversion proposals for Building 17 — one of the larger storehouses. The proposal retains the full internal volume and exposed structural frame, introduces a mezzanine level within the roof space, and adds an external fire escape stair to the gable end. The brick was textured to match the existing building and the model was lit to simulate natural daylight conditions through the existing window openings.

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 an architect's drawing — a space they can walk into, understand, and sell.