Planning Drawings, Explained

Elevation plans and elevation drawings

An elevation is your house drawn flat-on from outside — one drawing per face, to scale, showing windows, doors, rooflines and materials exactly where they are. A planning application wants existing elevations (the house as it stands) and proposed elevations (the house with your extension, dormer or new window in place), because the difference between the two is precisely what the council is being asked to approve. Elevations are where a proposal succeeds or fails on looks, which is why they are worth drawing properly rather than optimistically.

Floor plans

The view from above with the roof lifted off: rooms, walls, openings and dimensions, again in existing and proposed pairs. The proposed floor plan is the drawing you will look at most, because it is where the layout gets argued about at the kitchen table — which is exactly what our unlimited design-stage revisions are for.

Location plans and site plans

The location plan places your property in its surroundings on an Ordnance Survey base, usually at 1:1250, with the site edged in red — it tells the council which house on the street is asking. The site plan (or block plan) zooms in on your plot, showing the building footprint, boundaries and anything relevant nearby. Applications get rejected as invalid for surprisingly small mistakes on these, which is a slow way to lose three weeks.

Section drawings

A section is a vertical slice through the building, showing floor-to-ceiling heights, roof pitch and how the levels relate. Councils ask for sections where height matters — loft conversions and anything near a boundary being the usual suspects.

Building drawings, construction drawings and “blueprints”

These get used loosely, so to untangle them: planning drawings show what the building will look like and where it sits — that is what this page is about, and what the council decides on. Construction drawings (building regulations drawings) come later and show how it is actually built: structure, insulation, drainage, fire escape. They serve building control, a different system with a different checklist — getting planning permission does not exempt you from it. And a blueprint is simply the vintage word for all of the above; the drawings have not been blue since roughly the invention of the photocopier, but we always know what people mean.

Which drawings does your project need?

A householder application — an extension, a loft conversion, a garage conversion — needs the standard set: location and site plans, existing and proposed elevations, existing and proposed floor plans. That set is exactly what the Standard Planning Pack is, at a fixed £650, delivered council-ready in 7–10 days with unlimited revisions during the design stage. Permitted development projects use the same drawings in service of a Lawful Development Certificate, and if you would rather we did the measuring, the Enhanced Planning Pack adds a measured survey and 3D imaging.