The local council planning officer is the on person that you really do need to have on your side if you undertake to buy and renovate or restore any kind of heritage property. That long held dream of owning a gorgeous civil war aged stone mansion to ut, rebuild and then sell is oing to be a long hard slog if it comes off at all. There are many regulations within local building laws that stops developers from simply ripping down places of interest and simply building over them. There is the need to preserve any heritage elements deemed worthy without necessarily listing the entire place. There are also rules about not exceeding the existing footprint or not doing that in such a way as to cause an eyesore or other nuisance to neighbours. There are also regulations to stop a developer using unaturally garish or unsuitable materials on their project. One such application recently was to knock out the front elevation of an Arts & Crafts styled property – replacing thee features with some sort of render It would have completely obliterated some very fine decorative features across the fascade. During the osultation eriod, there were hundreds, probably thousands of objections to these plans with folk pleading and begging the council to refuse such actions.