Kitchen extensions in East Dulwich: opening up the back of an SE22 terrace

Walk along the streets off Lordship Lane and most of the houses are the same shape inside: a Victorian or Edwardian terrace with a narrow kitchen at the back, a separate dining room, and a side return, that strip of dead outdoor space running alongside the rear closet wing. The kitchen is dark, the family ends up living in two small rooms, and the garden feels cut off from the house. A kitchen extension in East Dulwich is the job that fixes all three at once, and it is one of the most common projects we run on SE22 terraces.

I run All Well Property Services and we work on period homes across Dulwich, so I have opened up the back of a lot of these houses. The principle is always the same. You either fill the side return, push out into the garden, or do both, and you take down the wall between the old back rooms so the cooking, eating and sitting space becomes one. What changes from house to house is the steelwork, the glazing, the ground conditions, and the approvals you need before anyone lifts a tool. Here is how the work actually goes on an SE22 terrace.

Rear, side return, or wraparound

There are three shapes a kitchen extension in East Dulwich usually takes, and the right one depends on your plot and your budget.

A side-return extension fills in the alley alongside the back room. On a typical SE22 terrace that strip is only a metre and a bit wide, but it runs the full depth of the original kitchen, and adding it transforms a corridor-width galley into a proper room. It keeps your garden length, which matters on the shorter plots.

A rear extension pushes the back wall of the house out into the garden. It gives you more floor area in one move than a side return does, but it eats into the garden, so on a short plot you have to be honest about how much lawn you are willing to lose.

A wraparound does both: it fills the side return and extends to the rear in one L-shaped footprint. It gives the largest open-plan kitchen and the most light, and it is the layout people picture when they imagine knocking the whole back of the house open. It is also the biggest build and the one most likely to need full planning permission rather than slipping under permitted development.

Most of the houses around Lordship Lane sit on the narrower terraced plots, so a side return or a modest wraparound tends to suit them better than a deep rear box that swallows the whole garden.

The steelwork that holds it all up

The part that makes an extension feel like one room rather than a box bolted onto the back is the steel. When you remove the original rear wall and the side wall of the closet wing, you are taking out structure that has been carrying the floors and roof above for over a century, so a steel frame goes in to carry that load instead.

On an SE22 side return the usual arrangement is a goalpost frame: two vertical posts and a beam across the top, sometimes with a second beam running back along the line of the old side wall. A wraparound needs more, often a steel running the full width of the opening plus a corner connection where the two arms of the L meet. The sizes come from a structural engineer's calculations, not from a rule of thumb, because they depend on the spans and what is sitting above.

These are pre-1919 houses, so the walls are solid brick, not cavity, and the original rear extension is often built off shallow footings. We check what the existing structure is standing on before we design the new foundations, because a new extension next to an old shallow footing has to be founded carefully so one does not undermine the other. On a terrace you are also building right up against the neighbours on both sides, which brings the Party Wall Act into it. Notifiable work needs party wall notices served before you start, and a party wall surveyor where a neighbour does not agree.

Glazing, and getting the light in

Light is the whole point. A north-facing back kitchen that was gloomy for a hundred years can become the brightest room in the house, and the glazing is what does it.

A roof lantern or a run of rooflights over the new floor pulls daylight straight down into the middle of the plan, which is where a deep extension would otherwise go dark. Across the back, big sliding or bi-fold doors open the kitchen onto the garden, so on a warm day the inside and outside become one space. The trade-off is that more glass means more attention to insulation and to summer overheating, so the specification has to balance the view against keeping the room comfortable. All Well Property Services is FENSA registered, which covers the replacement glazing and external doors, and the work is certified rather than left for you to sort out with Building Control afterwards.

The two approvals an SE22 extension can need

This is where Dulwich is different from the rest of South London, and it is worth getting straight before you commission drawings. Parts of SE22 sit on land managed by the Dulwich Estate, a charity that runs a Scheme of Management over the outside of properties. If your house is on the Estate, any work that changes its external appearance, and an extension certainly does, needs separate written approval from the Scheme of Management Office at The Old College, Gallery Road, SE21 7AE, on top of anything the council requires. The Estate publishes its current fees and an annual charge, and you build the Estate application into the programme rather than treating it as an afterthought.

That Estate approval is separate from, and in addition to, local-authority planning and Building Control. The local authority for most of East Dulwich is the London Borough of Southwark, though some streets fall under Lambeth or Lewisham, so the first thing to check is which council you are actually in. A modest side return may fall under permitted development and need no planning permission, but if your house is on the Estate it still needs Estate approval, because permitted development rights do not override the Scheme. Whatever the planning route, every extension needs Building Control sign-off for the structure, insulation, drainage and fire safety.

The mistake I see most often is a homeowner getting council permission, assuming the paperwork is done, and starting on site, only for the Estate to flag that the external change was never approved. Designing for both at once, from the first drawings, is what stops a project stalling halfway. Our sibling post on the Dulwich Estate Scheme of Management goes through the consent side in full if you want the detail.

How All Well Property Services handles it

All Well Property Services is a building and renovation company based in Anerley, South East London, and it works on period homes across Dulwich, including SE22. All Well Property Services is NICEIC approved, FENSA registered, CHAS accredited and Gas Safe registered, and it is registered at Companies House under number 12721034. The company has run these extensions since 2020, and it runs each project through a single project manager.

On an East Dulwich kitchen extension that means one person coordinates the structural engineer, the party wall notices, the council submission and the Estate application, and then the build itself: the steelwork, the new foundations, the glazing, the kitchen, the electrics under our NICEIC certification, and the gas under Gas Safe. You are not the one chasing four sets of trades and three sets of approvals while trying to keep a kitchen running for your family.

If you are thinking about opening up the back of your SE22 terrace and you want to know what your plot will take, which layout suits it, and whether your house sits on the Dulwich Estate, that is exactly what we work out on a free site visit. I will look at the structure, the side return and the garden with you, and tell you what is realistic before you spend anything on plans.