Builders in Hassocks

Hassocks is another village the railway invented. Keymer and Clayton were here long before it, and Hassocks grew up around the station between them, which is why the village has a Norman church at one end and a great deal of twentieth century housing in the middle.

We treat Hassocks, Keymer, Clayton and Ditchling as one patch. They are minutes apart, and a good share of our BN6 work has come from recommendations within the same few streets.

What we get asked to do here

The bulk of the housing is interwar, postwar and later, on plots with room at the back. That makes rear extensions the most common job by a distance, usually to turn a separate kitchen and dining room into one space opening onto the garden.

After that it is loft conversions, and the same warning applies here as in Burgess Hill: houses from the mid-1960s onwards tend to have trussed rafter roofs, which convert perfectly well but need the floor and roof independently supported first. It is a different job from converting a 1930s cut roof, and it should be a different price.

Older Keymer and Clayton properties are a separate proposition again, and those get restoration work rather than modernising.

Under the Downs

Hassocks sits right against the South Downs National Park boundary. Most of the village is outside it and falls under Mid Sussex District Council, but properties on the southern edge towards Clayton can fall inside, and if yours does then the National Park Authority is your planning authority instead, with tighter policy on scale, materials and roof lines.

It is worth checking rather than assuming, because it changes who you apply to and what is likely to be approved.