Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Camden

Heating in Camden

Camden's housing is old, tall and legally complicated. Bloomsbury is Georgian, Hampstead and Belsize Park are largely Victorian villas, and both are heavily covered by conservation area designation and, in places, by listing. As in Kensington, that reverses the usual sequence: the permitted flue route is established first and the appliance chosen to suit it. It also means we spend real time on where a condensate pipe and a gas run can go without appearing on a protected elevation.

The conversion pattern here is more extreme than almost anywhere else in London. A single Victorian villa in NW3 may hold four or five flats, each with its own boiler, all sharing one gas supply and one building. When we take on a job in a building like that, the first questions are about the whole building rather than the flat: how big is the incoming gas supply, what is already drawing on it, and does adding another appliance leave enough. Those are answerable, but not by looking only inside one front door.

Kentish Town and Gospel Oak add smaller terraces and a substantial amount of ex-local-authority stock, plus one of the busiest rental markets in north London. Between the conversions and the lettings, landlord gas safety certificates are a regular part of our week here — and in a converted house, a certificate has to consider the shared parts as well as the appliance, which is exactly the sort of thing a fifteen-minute visit misses.