Stevenage sits within our regular working area, a short drive from our St Albans office. That matters for two reasons: we can be on site quickly when it counts, and we’ve been through the local planning process enough times to know where applications tend to get questioned.

One recent example: a full rear extension and internal reconfiguration in Stevenage, where planning permission was secured despite pushback from the committee. That’s the kind of local knowledge that’s hard to get from a national practice working from a spreadsheet of postcodes.