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Camden is the conversion capital of England, and conversions fail in their own way

At the 2021 Census, 26.2% of Camden's 92,759 households lived in part of a converted or shared house, including bedsits. That is the highest share of any local authority in England, ahead of Hammersmith and Fulham on 24.5% and Kensington and Chelsea on 23.5%, and more than twice the London figure of 11.1%. A further 56.2% live in a purpose-built block and 2.4% live in a commercial building such as over a shop. Houses of any kind account for 13.4%: 8.1% terraced, 3.6% semi-detached and 1.7% detached.

A conversion is a Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian house that has been divided, sometimes twice over. One incoming cold main, one soil stack and one drainage run were sized for a single household. They now serve three, four or five. Every kitchen and bathroom added since has been plumbed by whoever was cheapest in the decade it happened, and the waste from a second-floor shower room frequently runs at a lazy fall across a ceiling void into a stack that was never designed to take it.

The failures are therefore predictable and specific. Blockages present in the lowest flat because that is where a shared stack backs up first. Leaks appear two floors below the fault because water tracks along a joist before it finds a ceiling. Cold water pressure collapses on the top floor when the ground-floor flat runs a bath. Waste pipes that were bodged through a party wall drip inside the structure for months. And the boundary between what you own and what the freeholder owns runs somewhere inside a wall that nobody has opened since 1985.

Which is why the first part of a Camden job is nearly always tracing rather than cutting. We use acoustic and thermal detection to find the failure before anything is opened up, because in a conversion the wrong wall is expensive and the right wall is often not the one the water is coming through. Camden also has the most single-person households of the four inner boroughs we cover most heavily, 38.7% of all households, which in practice means a lot of leaks are found by a neighbour rather than by the person whose pipe it is.

Camden heats about 15,000 properties itself, and licenses HMOs across the whole borough

9.4% of Camden households are heated by a district or communal heat network only. Across London the figure is 3.4% and across England it is 0.9%. Only the City of London and Southwark have a higher share of any local authority in England. Camden Council states that it has several communal systems across the borough providing heating, hot water or cooking gas to about 15,000 properties, and that if your home is connected to Camden's district heating system you cannot switch gas suppliers.

Two of them are named and quantified. The Somers Town decentralised energy network supplies heating and hot water to over 600 homes, a school and community facilities, across Monica Shaw Court, Oakshott Court, Clyde Court, the Goldington Estate, the Mayford Estate and Tessa Jowell Court. The Gospel Oak network provides approximately 50% of the heat required for 1,449 homes across six estates, using waste heat from the Royal Free Hospital's combined heat and power plant. Camden also notes that under the Heat Network (Metering and Billing) Regulations 2014 a heat meter is required only where it is cost-effective and technically possible, so some homes on these networks are not metered at all.

The practical point for a resident is the same one every heat network resident learns the hard way: if the fault is in the energy centre, the buried main or the block riser, no plumber can fix it from inside your flat. What an engineer can usefully do at midnight is prove the fault is upstream of your heat interface unit, get you hot water another way where that is possible, and put the finding in writing so the managing agent or the estate team has something dated to act on.

Alongside that sits the licensing regime, and Camden's is unusually broad. The London Borough of Camden Council Designation for an Area for Additional Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation 2025 was made on 2 July 2025, came into force on 8 December 2025, ceases to have effect on 8 December 2030, and applies to the whole area of the district of the London Borough of Camden. It catches HMOs occupied by three or more persons in two or more households, and section 257 converted-flat HMOs where less than half the flats are owner-occupied. Camden also points out that although flats in purpose-built blocks of three or more flats are exempt from mandatory licensing, all such flats in Camden must still be licensed under the additional scheme.

The licence conditions themselves do not set a temperature. They require the property to comply with Camden's HMO standards and to be maintained in good order and repair, and it is the standards that get specific: fixed space heating in every bedroom, living room, bathroom and kitchen diner, capable of maintaining a constant temperature of at least 21°C in sleeping rooms and bathrooms and at least 18°C in all other rooms, with adequate controls such as thermostatic radiator valves, and heating available to individual tenants at all times where the system is centralised. Sinks, baths, wash hand basins and showers must have a constant supply of hot and cold water, and the kitchen sink must have hot water without fluctuation in temperature. On top of that, regulation 5 of the Management of Houses in Multiple Occupation (England) Regulations 2006 puts a standing duty on the manager to keep the water supply and drainage system in good, clean and working condition, to keep storage cisterns covered, and to protect any water fitting liable to damage by frost. Breaching a licence condition can attract a civil penalty of up to £30,000 and a rent repayment order of up to 12 months' rent.

Where a soil pipe is allowed to go, and why that decides the permanent repair

Camden has 40 conservation areas, which the council says cover about half of the borough, and more than 5,600 listed buildings ranging from the 11th century St Pancras Old Church to the 1970s Alexandra Road Estate. That is the backdrop to every permanent plumbing alteration on the outside of a Camden building.

The council's rule on listed buildings is workable if you know it. Regular maintenance and like-for-like repairs that match the original work in every way do not need listed building consent, but if materials or methods that differ from the original are used then consent is needed. Camden also states plainly that it is a criminal offence to carry out or cause work to be carried out to a listed building without consent even if you did not realise the building was listed, and that every part of a listed building is protected, including the interior and any later alterations or additions.

In conservation areas the constraint is about position rather than material. Camden's Hampstead conservation area design guide states that services such as flues, soil and vent pipes and new chimneys should always be located on the side or rear elevation so that the smart, public face of the building remains untouched, that new flues, chimneys or soil vent pipes now need planning permission on the front elevation and on sides that front the street, and that they will be resisted there. It also confirms that replacing a cowl with one the same size or smaller does not need permission. That guide is specific to Hampstead, but the direction of travel is clear across the borough, and Camden separately requires that where a proposal involves installing, altering or replacing a chimney, flue or soil and vent pipe, all scale drawings and plans are annotated accordingly.

We split the job in two because of it. The out-of-hours visit stops the water and makes the building safe using reversible methods. The permanent reinstatement gets specified properly, and where a new external soil pipe, condensate run or flue is the honest answer we tell you which consent that needs before we commit you to it. In a borough where roughly a third of all homes belong to the council, which owns over 22,000 social rented homes and 10,000 leasehold homes, many of them in conservation areas and built over a hundred years ago, that conversation happens more often here than almost anywhere else.