Steel staircases in Keston

The steel staircase jobs Keston houses produce

Keston's housing is mostly detached, and the houses on the Keston Park roads, in Ravensbourne Park off Poulters Wood and Rolinsden Way, and along Keston Gardens and Windmill Drive are the kind where we fit an external steel staircase from a first-floor room or terrace down to the garden. Keston Park runs from original 1920s houses to modern rebuilds, and where a rebuild needs a stair, a balcony and a balustrade in one finish we fabricate them as a set. The Victorian semis and terraced cottages on Heathfield Road, Croydon Road and Leaves Green Road tend to call for something smaller: a replacement steel stair, frontage railings or a Juliet balcony. Between the two sit 1930s semis and mock-Tudor detached houses along the A233 and bungalows on Blackness Lane, while the purpose-built flats on Westerham Road and the Holwood Estate are where fire escapes and communal balconies come into it.

Working inside Keston Park

Keston Park lies east of Westerham Road: 140 acres, gated, laid out from 1923 with about 200 detached houses on plots of at least half an acre. Forest Drive, Forest Ridge, Ninhams Wood, Longdon Wood, Beech Dell, Mark Close, Pine Glade and Holwood Park Avenue are private roads, owned by the estate along with the verges, gates and lighting, so we arrange delivery through the gated entrance in advance and keep the lorry to the estate's 20 mph limit. The 1920s covenants still require estate approval of elevations, and the estate has been a conservation area since 1989. A steel staircase or balcony on a visible elevation is therefore looked at twice, by the estate and by Bromley planners, and we prepare scaled drawings that serve both. Powder coating to the RAL colour of the window frames keeps the steel from competing with the house. Holwood Park Avenue carries a BR6 postcode although it is part of the estate.

Conservation areas, listed buildings and the Green Belt

Three conservation areas touch Keston: Keston Village (1977), Keston Park (1989) and Bromley, Hayes and Keston Commons (2000), plus Nash as a rural hamlet. With no published appraisals, the council's map confirms whether a house is inside, and Policy 41 then expects a steel staircase to respect the scale, form and materials around it. Keston Windmill at 126 Heathfield Road and Holwood House are Grade I, Keston Parish Church on Church Road is Grade II* and Leaves Green Road has Grade II cottages, one of them flint; anything fixed to a listed building needs listed building consent. Forest Lodge on Westerham Road is only locally listed, though committee reports weigh its setting. Land around the common and south along the A233 is largely Metropolitan Green Belt, where Policy 49 rules out disproportionate additions to the original house, and Article 4 directions cover Blackness Lane and The Drift, so there we check before relying on permitted development for gates or railings.

Access, ground and finishes around the common

The village core along Heathfield Road and Commonside is a working centre, with the shopping parade at 13 to 19 and 4 Heathfield Road, The Fox Inn, The Greyhound and the common car park off Fishponds Road all drawing traffic, so we agree where the lorry will stand before we set off. Keston Common is 55 hectares of heathland and woodland: a biological SSSI, scheduled Iron Age earthworks, three early-19th-century fishponds and Caesar's Well, source of the River Ravensbourne. Trees inside the conservation areas get extra protection under Policy 43, and with woodland on the doorstep we set footings and lifting positions around roots, not through them. Steel beside ponds and under trees stays damp for longer, which is why our external stairs are hot-dip galvanised before powder coating. Keston Ridge is a major skyline ridge in the Local Plan and the windmill a named landmark, so a rooftop stair or terrace may be judged against those views.

Getting to Keston from Westerham Hill

From 4 Fort Cottages on Westerham Hill it is 7.3 miles to Keston village centre, about 18 minutes by road, and 6.8 miles, around 17 minutes, to Keston Mark. The A233 carries almost the whole journey: it leaves the A25 east of Westerham, climbs past our door, runs through Biggin Hill and past the green at Leaves Green beside Biggin Hill Airport, then passes Keston Common to reach the Keston Mark junction with the A232 Croydon Road and Oakley Road. The 246 bus follows the same road between Bromley and Westerham. The Local Plan records significant delays on all four arms of Keston Mark, so we time surveys and installations outside the peaks where we can. Warlingham is also 7.3 miles from Keston village, which puts it well inside the ten-mile circle we work around that town.

Where we cover around Keston

Keston for us means the village around Heathfield Road and Commonside, the suburban Keston Mark area that runs on into Locksbottom and Bromley Common, Keston Park on both its BR2 and BR6 roads, the detached houses of Ravensbourne Park, Keston Gardens and Windmill Drive, the bungalows on Blackness Lane and the flats on Westerham Road and the Holwood Estate. Nash, the rural hamlet to the south-west, and Leaves Green, the village green on the A233 next to Biggin Hill Airport, both share the KESTON post town and are covered on the same terms. Beyond that, the same road out from Westerham Hill takes in Hayes around the station, Coney Hall and West Wickham to the west, Bromley Common to the north, Locksbottom by the Princess Royal University Hospital, Farnborough to the east, Downe to the south-east and Biggin Hill to the south.

Questions from Keston customers