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Conservation Area Windows Independent UK reference
About

About this site

Conservation Area Windows is an independent reference on one narrow, badly documented question: what you are actually allowed to do to the windows of a building in a UK conservation area.

Why it exists

Almost everything written about this subject online is published by a company that wants to sell you windows. That has two predictable effects. Firms that sell timber joinery tend to overstate how impossible modern glazing is; firms that sell uPVC or aluminium tend to understate how likely a refusal is. Both frequently repeat the same handful of errors — most commonly that you need "conservation area consent" to change a window in England, a consent regime that was abolished in 2013 and that never applied to windows in the first place.

Meanwhile the accurate sources are scattered and hard going: primary legislation on legislation.gov.uk, national policy and guidance on GOV.UK, technical advice from Historic England and Historic Environment Scotland, and roughly 300 local planning authorities each publishing their own window policy in their own format.

This site pulls those together and writes down what they actually say, with links so you can check every claim yourself.

What we do not do

Editorial rules we follow

  1. Primary sources for legal claims. Statute and statutory instruments from legislation.gov.uk; national policy and guidance from GOV.UK, the Planning Portal, Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland, Cadw and the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland.
  2. Jurisdictions kept separate. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have genuinely different rules. Every page says which nation it is describing.
  3. Dates on everything. Each page carries the date its content was last checked against its sources. Planning law changes; undated guidance is worthless.
  4. We say when we do not know. Where the law is unsettled, where authorities disagree, or where we could not verify a claim, we say so rather than pick the tidier answer.
  5. We name the myths. Where a widely repeated claim is wrong, we quote the source that shows it is wrong.

How it is funded

The site is published by My Second Brand Ltd, a UK company that also operates window restoration and glazing brands. That is a commercial interest, so we state it plainly here rather than bury it: it is exactly the kind of interest you should assume is present on every other page you read about this subject too.

The practical safeguard is that this site carries no enquiry form, no phone number for a trade partner, no affiliate links and no advertising. If a page ever does start recommending a supplier, treat that as a change of character and weigh it accordingly. Our test for every sentence is whether it would still be written that way if it cost us a sale.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or ambiguous, we want to fix it. See corrections for how to tell us, and what we do about it.

Reusing this material

Quote us, cite us, and link back. Local authorities, architects, surveyors and joinery firms are welcome to link to these pages in their own guidance. We would rather be a source than a competitor.