Plinth Site Constraints
Site constraint reports for architects' practices
Bristol

Before your price, check the site.

Send an address and one line on what is being built. Back comes what the site is designated, what surveys that triggers, what will hold the programme up, and which consultants the job will need. £15 per site, free during the closed trial.

No account. No subscription. One site at a time.

What you send
— address + postcode — a map pin, if you have one — what is being built, in a line
What comes back
Site constraints — desk report
The checks—
Surveys triggered—
Programme risks—
Other fees—

What you send. An address, and a line on what is being built.

What comes back. What applies to the site, what it triggers, and what it will cost in time.

01

What the site does not initially tell you — and the time it takes to find out

The hard part is clicking around on different pages, hunting for different answers.

Spotting the designation nobody checked.

An Article 4 direction. A tree with an order on it. A boundary that runs through the plot rather than around it. Cheap to find in an afternoon. Expensive to find at validation.

The survey with a season on it.

A bat activity survey cannot be run outside its window. Miss it and the programme does not slip by a fortnight — it slips to next year, and you agreed dates before anyone knew.

The consultant nobody priced.

Asbestos survey. Measured survey. Structural appraisal. Drainage strategy. Each one is a fee your client has not been told about, and none of them are yours.

A job cannot be priced when the site is not understood.

But busy desk work should not slow you down. Plinth does it for you, so that your proposal already has the site in it.

02

What comes back

01 · The checks

Designations, answered against live public data for the position you give. Where a boundary falls within the accuracy of that position, it is reported as unresolved rather than asserted either way. Every designation is asked of live public data at the time of the run, and where the answer is not certain it says so.

02 · Likely surveys and assessments

What the works themselves trigger, not only what the map says. Ecology, asbestos, structural, drainage, party wall — with the seasonal window named where one applies, and whether it is open.

03 · What can delay the programme

The items carrying a lead time or a season, in the order they will bite. This is the section that decides whether the dates you are about to agree are dates you can keep.

04 · The consultants the job will need

The consultants the job will need, so your client hears about them from you at the start rather than from someone else halfway through.

03

What gets checked

Conservation area Article 4 direction Tree preservation zone Flood risk zone Green belt National park National Landscape (AONB) Site of Special Scientific Interest Ancient woodland Listed building Scheduled monument Registered park or garden World Heritage Site Special Area of Conservation Special Protection Area

Answered at the time of the run, against the address or the map pin you give. A pin narrows the site from roughly a hundred metres to about twenty-five, and where it lands on a building we check the building's whole outline. Five metres needs a measured survey, a title plan or an OS grid reference.

England only, for now. Outside England these layers are not wired in. The report would come back saying every check was unanswered, which is honest and worth nothing, so I do not run those.

04

A few lines it does not cross

It is desk work, not a survey.

Nobody visits the site. This is the work done before a site visit or a pre-application, so those start from the right questions.

Unresolved is not a guess.

Where a boundary falls within the accuracy of the position given, it says so rather than rounding the answer up to yes or down to no.

It does not advise on planning merit.

Whether it will be approved is your judgement. This tells you what applies, not what to do about it.

Your client never hears from us.

The report comes to you.

05

Order a report

No mailing list. No sequence. One person replying.

Or write directly: [email address]

£15 per site, free during the closed trial.

The invoice comes with the report, not before it. If what arrives tells you nothing you did not already know about the site, do not pay it.

Send the address and a line on the job. If the site needs a pin to answer properly — a long garden, a terrace on a boundary, a farmstead — I will come back and ask for one before running it.

English sites only at the moment — see above. If you send one outside England I will tell you rather than run it.

This is early. Every report is read before it goes out, and if something in it is wrong for the street you know better than I do, I want to hear it.