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Two or more heating systems in the same home, more often than anywhere in London

9.27% of Kensington and Chelsea households recorded two or more types of central heating, not including renewable energy, the highest share of the 33 London local authorities against 8.15% for London. 0.50% heat on oil only, also the highest in London and more than four times the London figure of 0.12%. 0.77% are on tank or bottled gas only, fifth highest. 3.44% recorded no central heating at all, third highest in London. 14.08% heat on electricity only, eighth highest, and 63.45% on mains gas alone, twenty-eighth of thirty-three.

Read together, that is a borough where a single dwelling frequently contains more than one heat source at once: a gas boiler plus electric panel heaters in a converted upper floor, a boiler plus an immersion, gas plus a supplementary system serving a basement, or a period house where different floors were done at different times by different people. It is a stock that has been improved repeatedly rather than replaced, and improvements layer rather than supersede.

For an engineer that means diagnosis takes longer and guesswork costs more. A hot water failure in a house with two systems is not a single fault tree. So we diagnose the whole installation before quoting, not the appliance that happens to be nearest the fault, and we say plainly when a repair will only hold until the next weakest part in the chain gives way.

Basements, and the first planning policy in the country to set limits on them

No other borough on this site has a subterranean construction story like this one. The Royal Borough adopted Policy CL7: Basements on 21 January 2015 as part of its Local Plan, and its own Supplementary Planning Document describes the policy as the first of its kind in setting limits on the extent of development, adopted after a two-year preparation and a lengthy examination whose hearings ran over four and a half days.

Two criteria matter most to anyone with water in a basement. Criterion (a) requires a basement to 'Not exceed a maximum of 50% of each garden or open part of the' site, and the SPD explains that the 50% maximum extent is measured separately for each garden. Criterion (f) requires that a basement 'not involve excavation underneath a listed building (including vaults)'. The policy also restricts basements to one storey other than on large sites, and the SPD requires site investigation covering ground conditions and groundwater, an assessment of the effect of a basement on groundwater including cumulative effects with other nearby basements, and consideration of drainage, sustainable drainage systems and flooding.

The council is candid about why. It states that the borough has the highest residential property values in the country, the highest household density and the tightest built environment, that 73% of the borough is within conservation areas, and that basements are built under large villas, small terraced houses and even mews houses with the narrowest of accesses.

The plumbing consequence is specific and it is the reason a Kensington basement flood is not the same job as a Fulham one. A basement below the water table, with a tanked structure, a sump and pump system and often a plant room in it, fails differently. Loss of power to a sump pump is a flood. A failed non-return valve is a flood. A blocked or surcharged drain in a street where several neighbouring basements share the same downstream capacity is a flood in the lowest one. We treat a basement call as a drainage and pumping problem first and a plumbing problem second, because that ordering is what actually stops the water.

Mansion blocks, stucco terraces and conversions, and almost nothing owned outright with a mortgage

56.68% of homes here are in a purpose-built block of flats or tenement, seventh highest in London, and 23.50% are part of a converted or shared house, third highest against 11.06% for London. Terraced houses account for 12.80%, twenty-eighth of thirty-three, and detached and semi-detached together for 4.24%.

The tenure picture is unusual in a way that affects who we deal with. Only 11.80% of households own with a mortgage or loan, thirty-second of the thirty-three London local authorities. 19.89% own outright. 39.56% rent privately, third highest in London, and 16.86% rent from a housing association or other social landlord, third highest. So the borough splits sharply between long-held or unencumbered ownership, a very large private rented sector and a substantial social sector, with the ordinary mortgaged owner-occupier almost absent.

Practically, the person who calls us at 2am is disproportionately a tenant, a housekeeper, a managing agent's out-of-hours line or a porter. We work accordingly: isolate first, stabilise the property, then quote the repair to whoever is actually responsible for paying. In a mansion block that usually means finding the isolation point on a landing or in a riser cupboard rather than under a sink, and knowing that the flat that floods is rarely the flat where the fault is.

43.71% of households here contain one person, second highest in London, and 28.91% contain two. Small households in large, old, heavily serviced buildings is a combination that produces a particular failure pattern: systems that sit idle, run intermittently, and fail when they are finally asked to work hard. Stagnation, seized valves and airlocks after a period of non-occupation are routine calls here in a way they are not in a full family house.

Thirty-eight conservation areas covering nearly three quarters of the borough

The council states that the Royal Borough is characterised by a rich historic built environment with nearly three quarters of the borough protected by 38 separate conservation areas, and its Basements SPD puts the figure at 73%. That is a level of designation that changes the default answer to almost any question about external work.

What it does not restrict is emergency work inside the building. Stopping a leak, isolating a supply, replacing a cylinder, re-piping a bathroom within the flat: those are not designation questions. What it does restrict is anything visible. A new soil or vent pipe in a new position on a stucco elevation, a boiler flue on a street frontage, an external condensate run, replacement rainwater goods in a material that does not match, or a ventilation grille in a historic interior. Those are consent questions in most of this borough, not a minority of it.

Basements under listed buildings are the sharpest version of that. Policy CL7 criterion (f) precludes excavation underneath a listed building including vaults, and the council's SPD explains that proposals involving basements in the gardens of listed buildings are considered separately and must not harm the significance of the listed building. If you have a period house with vaults under the pavement and water in them, the range of permanent solutions available to you is narrower than a contractor from outside the borough will assume.

We separate the two jobs deliberately. The out-of-hours visit makes the building watertight and the supply safe using reversible work. The permanent reinstatement gets specified properly, with the consent position raised before you commit rather than after an enforcement letter arrives.

Additional HMO licensing across the whole borough since June 2023

Mandatory HMO licensing applies here as everywhere, where five or more people forming two or more households share a kitchen, bathroom or WC. On top of that the Royal Borough implemented an additional HMO licensing scheme on 1 June 2023, covering all HMOs defined by section 254 of the Housing Act 2004 that do not fall under the mandatory scheme, which in practice means properties occupied by three or more people living as two or more separate households who share facilities.

The council's case for the scheme is worth knowing because it describes the stock we work in. It reported that there are 8,244 HMOs in Kensington and Chelsea, that 44% of the borough's housing stock is privately rented, that its research showed approximately 2,400 privately rented properties with the most serious hazards, and that under mandatory licensing alone it could license only around 185 properties.

For us that means a repair in a licensed property is a documentation job as well as a mechanical one. Where we carry out gas work we leave the Gas Safe certificate covering the appliances we touched, plus a dated record of the fault, the fix and anything left outstanding, in a form a licensing officer will accept without asking for a second visit.