The decisions behind a well-planned repaint.

The four questions these guides ask you to settle

The guides are arranged around decisions that change a decorating brief before anyone talks about dates. The conservation and colour guide asks you to name the council, the designation and the operation, including preparation, and to separate a repaint from changes to the shopfront and from new signage. The access guide asks you to follow the load from the street regime, including the permanent Covent Garden traffic controls, through parking, scaffold and skip permissions, to the hours Westminster and Camden publish and the separate TfL charge checks. The flat-above-the-shop guide asks you to draw private rooms and shared routes on one plan, and to put a responsible person beside every surface that the occupier cannot instruct alone. The commercial guide asks you to phase a restaurant, shop or office so that trading areas and closed areas are explicit, and to leave a product record when a zone reopens. Read the guide that matches your constraint. A frontage colour and a delivery route are both necessary and they are not the same problem. Bringing the answered questions back to the enquiry form is what makes the guides useful. Leaving them as general reading changes nothing on site.

How a guide differs from the service it points toward

A guide poses the constraint. A service page poses the surface. You will often need both, and they should not be collapsed into one another. Conservation and colour can sit beside exterior painting, joinery or colour planning, because the permission question and the sample question meet on a façade. Access and working hours can sit beside any service that needs a vehicle, a tower or a shift outside the ordinary day. Decorating a flat above the street sits beside interior painting and colour planning, and it adds the stair, the shop and the lease. Commercial repainting sits beside the commercial decorating service and the shopfront service, and it adds the release plan. The guide does not choose the paint system. The service page does not obtain the parking suspension. In the enquiry, a short paragraph from each is enough: the surfaces, the designation if you have checked it, the route from the kerb, and the hours the building will allow. Cross-links on the guides point to the services and the neighbourhoods. Follow them when the text has raised a question you have not yet answered in your own note.

Limits of the guides when a decision belongs to someone else

Nothing on the guide pages is a consent, a licence or a booking. Westminster and Camden both expect an address-specific check before a conservation-area boundary, an Article 4 direction or a related control is treated as settled, and Camden’s material is not a statement that every repaint needs planning permission. A landlord’s letter, a managing agent’s house rule and a council decision remain separate pieces of paper. The access guide can tell you which published process to open. It cannot tell you that a bay will be free or that a scaffold licence will be issued. The commercial and flat guides can show you how to phase occupied buildings. They cannot know your lease. Where a guide cites a notice period or a set of hours, those figures are the councils’ published positions and they should be rechecked before you rely on them for a programme. The guides do not describe commissions this division has carried out, and they do not offer timings or prices. They are here to make your enquiry precise enough that the open questions are visible. The agreement for any work is a separate document, made for the address and the scope you confirm.

Sources: Westminster: conservation-area checks; Camden: conservation-area checks