Boiler service in Petts Wood

The houses in Petts Wood

A planned suburb, built almost from scratch

Petts Wood shares its postcode with Orpington but is a distinct and unusually well-documented planned garden suburb, built almost from scratch in the 1920s and 30s by a developer who bought up farmland south of the railway with the specific intention of building high-class commuter housing. The layout follows garden suburb principles deliberately: low front boundaries, visible front gardens, and more generous spacing between houses than typical interwar semi development elsewhere in the area. Bromley's own planning guidance recognises five separate conservation areas within Petts Wood, reflecting how much of the original interwar layout has survived intact.

Interwar, but a size up

Practically, Petts Wood behaves like a higher-specification version of the standard interwar suburb found across Orpington and West Wickham: boilers in kitchen cupboards or lofts, cavity brick construction, and the same recurring loft issues, condensate freezing, ageing flue seals after re-roofing, found throughout the area's 1930s stock, but on larger plots and often larger houses than the equivalent semi elsewhere. Because plots tend to be more generous, system boilers and cylinders turn up more often than in a standard three-bed semi, and where a house has had a side or rear extension, common on these bigger plots, an original combi sized for the pre-extension footprint can be found running short. The conservation designations mean external alterations may need a heritage-conscious approach, much as in Chislehurst.