Solar on barn conversions
A barn conversion often has everything a solar installation wants — large uninterrupted roof planes, a rural plot, no immediate neighbours. What it also frequently has is a planning history full of conditions, and sometimes a listing that catches the building you were not thinking about.
Read the decision notice for the conversion before you do anything else.
Barn conversions are among the likeliest properties to have had permitted development rights removed by planning condition — the authority granted the conversion partly on how the building would look, and wants a say in what happens to it afterwards.
If that condition exists, the Class A analysis does not help you, and a planning application is required for something that would otherwise need none.
Three checks, in order
1. The conversion’s planning conditions. On the decision notice, obtainable from the authority’s planning register and often already in your conveyancing pack. Look for any condition referring to the General Permitted Development Order — the usual form withdraws specified rights for the property.
2. Listing, and its extent. Barns are sometimes listed in their own right and frequently sit in the curtilage of a listed farmhouse. Curtilage listing can catch structures predating 1 July 1948 without them appearing in the list entry. Works affecting a listed building’s character without consent are a criminal offence.
3. Any Article 4 direction, which does the same job as a condition but across an area rather than a property.
Only once those three are clear does the ordinary analysis apply.
What barn conversions have going for them
Large, uninterrupted roof planes. No dormers, few stacks, often a single span. That means a clean rectangular array, which is both more efficient and better looking — and a rectangular footprint is one of the things that helps a planning application in a sensitive area.
Rural plots. Space for ground mounting if the roof is constrained — though Class B’s limits are tight, and within the curtilage of a listed building standalone solar is excluded entirely.
Outbuildings. Cart sheds, stables and stores, each a “building situated within the curtilage of a dwellinghouse” and so within Class A in its own right — unless the dwellinghouse is listed, in which case Class A excludes them.
Often good orientation, because agricultural buildings were sited for use rather than aspect, and a long axis frequently runs east–west.
A listed farmhouse plus a converted barn is the combination that catches people.
Class A does not permit solar on a building within the curtilage of a listed dwellinghouse. So the barn that looks like the obvious location may be excluded precisely because of the house next to it — and curtilage listing may bring it into the consent regime as well.
Establish the relationship between the buildings before designing around either.
The structure
Converted barns vary enormously. Some are essentially new buildings inside old walls, with modern trusses. Others retain historic timber, sometimes with visible repairs and alterations from the conversion itself.
That places most of them squarely in MIS 3002’s territory for requiring a qualified structural engineer: a roof type not covered by standard methodologies, evidence of post-construction modification, or signs of distress. See structural surveys.
Ask what the conversion did to the roof, and get the structural assessment in writing. If the conversion drawings exist, the installer’s engineer should see them.
Covering
Barn conversions carry everything — reclaimed clay tile, slate, stone slate, profiled metal sheet, and occasionally asbestos cement on a retained outbuilding. Each changes the fixing method rather than the output; see roof types.
Stone slate in particular is heavy, fragile and often of heritage value, which combines the structural and the consent problems in one covering.
Sources
- The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2, Part 14
- Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, section 7
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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