by Henry VIII applies to convert his loft and discovers that building anything now requires the approval of people who have never met him
I once commissioned an entire wing of Hampton Court without consulting a single architect outside my own household. My loft conversion requires approval from a planning committee that has never once met me.
The Application
Dev helped me submit the application online, uploading drawings prepared by an actual architect, a man named Sanjay who patiently explained that my initial sketch, drawn freehand and featuring what I had labelled a modest turret, would not, in his words, meet building regulations, current fire safety standards, or basic structural logic.
The Neighbour Consultation
The council notified my immediate neighbours of the application, inviting objections within a twenty one day window, a process I found genuinely startling given that in my original reign, building anything I wished on my own land required consulting precisely nobody, and any neighbour who objected typically did so only once before reconsidering entirely.
The Objection
One neighbour, a man three doors down I have never met, submitted a formal objection citing concerns about loss of light to his garden, a complaint I found personally wounding despite never having spoken to him, and which the council took seriously enough to request revised drawings from Sanjay showing the exact shadow the new roofline would cast at different times of year.
The Wait
The application, Sanjay warned me, would take a minimum of eight weeks to process, possibly longer if further information was requested, a timeline I found genuinely difficult to accept from a man who once built and consecrated an entire church within a matter of months purely because I wanted a shorter route to remarrying.
The Approval
Permission was eventually granted, with conditions attached regarding window placement and roof materials, conditions I have agreed to entirely, having learned, slowly and at considerable expense, that in this century a man does not simply build what he wishes on his own land. He asks. He waits. He revises the drawings. And eventually, after two and a half months, he is allowed to have his turret, provided it is described, for planning purposes, as a Juliet balcony instead.
The Build Begins
Sanjay has scheduled the build to begin in six weeks, weather and scaffolding permitting, and has already warned me that the finished roofline will look considerably less dramatic than my original sketch suggested, a disappointment I have decided to accept gracefully, mostly because Sanjay has been right about literally everything else so far, including my inability to accurately estimate the width of a staircase.
Sanjay has promised to send progress photographs throughout the build, a level of communication I have come to appreciate enormously after months of far less forthcoming correspondence from nearly everyone else I have dealt with in this country, planning committee included. The turret, sadly, did not survive planning, a loss recorded properly alongside the rest of my succession plan. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: Burnham’s housing plan opening, as tradition demands, with a speech about how big it is, Burnham’s separate plan to nationalise bricks entirely, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
