Builders in Tadworth, up on the Surrey Downs.

Tadworth sits high on the Surrey Downs, a village on chalk with the gallops and grandstands of Epsom Downs racecourse to the north and the open country of Walton Heath and Headley Heath to the south and west. The middle of it is easy to picture. A small parade of shops, the station on the Tattenham Corner branch line, Tadworth Street running down past the older cottages, and Tadworth Court and its grounds beyond. Away from the centre, KT20 spreads over a lot of ground. Shelvers Way and the roads off it climb the hill in long sweeps, the A217 carries traffic north to Burgh Heath and south past Lower Kingswood towards the top of Reigate Hill, and Dorking Road heads west into Walton on the Hill and its pond. The thing anybody working here notices first is how much green sits between the houses. Wide verges, deep hedges, oaks and pines, long front gardens and drives that disappear behind planting. It is a village that has kept its trees, and those trees have a say in almost every building project.

The housing stock is unusually generous. Much of Tadworth was laid out in the Edwardian years and then again between the wars, when large detached houses went up on plots that would hold three or four homes closer to London. Tile hung gables, deep tiled roofs, leaded lights, brick and render, and rooms built at a time when families expected space. Nearer the station and around Tattenham Corner there are tidy 1930s semis and short post war closes, most with long back gardens. Kingswood, a couple of minutes up the road, has some of the most substantial houses in this part of Surrey, set well back on wooded roads and behind gated drives. Walton on the Hill mixes older cottages near the pond with big family homes backing onto the heath and the golf courses, while Lower Kingswood and Burgh Heath add interwar semis, bungalows and newer developments to the picture. Very few jobs up here are alike, and hardly any of them are small.

For a builder, the plots are the opportunity and the trees are the constraint. Space at the side and the rear means a wraparound or a double storey extension is often possible without crowding anybody, and there is usually somewhere sensible for an annexe, a garage with a room over it, or a garden room. It also means the groundworks deserve proper thought. The ground here is chalk with clay and flints sitting over it in places, so foundation depths can change across a single plot, and mature oaks and pines bring root protection zones and deeper or engineered foundations with them. Many of those trees are protected, and it is far cheaper to design around one than to argue about it later. Access is usually kinder than a town centre job, with room to park and set down, but the drives are often long, gravelled and beautifully planted, so we agree the route in, protect the surfaces and keep the muck off the lawn. On the bigger houses there is normally steelwork, sometimes a basement or a lift shaft, so the structure gets designed properly rather than guessed at.

Planning for Tadworth, Kingswood, Walton on the Hill, Burgh Heath and Lower Kingswood sits with Reigate and Banstead Borough Council. Plenty of single storey rear work still falls under permitted development, which is the quicker route, but two things catch people out locally. The first is the Green Belt, which wraps around all of these villages. On Green Belt land the council looks hard at how much bigger a house would become, and a replacement dwelling is judged against the size of the one it replaces, so the numbers matter from the first sketch onwards. The second is trees and character. There are conservation areas and tree preservation orders across this part of the borough, and as you head towards Box Hill and Headley you are into the Surrey Hills, where materials, roof shapes and the way a house sits in the landscape all carry weight. We do not employ architects. We work alongside architects and designers, either yours or people we have known for years, and we give them the buildability and the cost picture early, so what goes in for approval is what can actually be built for the money.

We are a design and build company based in Reigate, ten minutes down the hill from Lower Kingswood, and we have been building in this corner of Surrey since 1996. Being close by matters more than it sounds. It means an early start on site, a quick visit when something needs a second opinion, and someone who still turns up after handover. We are CHAS Accredited, SSIP Assessed and fully insured, and we run the whole job with our own team and trades we have used for years. Groundworks, structure, roofing, joinery, kitchens, bathrooms and decorating, priced in writing and managed by one person you can ring. From the soil in the ground to the keys in your hand.