Air conditioning in Kenton

Brent Museum and Archives, the council's own local history service, dates the split: from 1934 the southern part of Kenton was in Wembley Urban District, and from 1937 in Wembley Borough, while the northern part was in Harrow Urban District. Brent inherited Wembley in 1965 and Harrow inherited Harrow, and the line has not really moved since.

It is tempting to say the boundary is Kenton Road. It runs close to it for much of its length, and Brent's own appraisal for the Northwick Circle conservation area describes that area as just south of the A4006 Kenton Road, on the boundary with the London Borough of Harrow. But neither council publishes the boundary as a street name, and it does not follow the road the whole way. Treat north and south of Kenton Road as a rule of thumb, not as an answer.

The postcode will not settle it either. HA3 is the main district across Kenton and it covers addresses in both boroughs, so two neighbours can share a postcode district and be dealt with by different councils. We establish which authority your address falls in before quoting, because the guidance above applies on one side and not the other.

Brent has 22 conservation areas and states that all of its residential conservation areas are covered by Article 4 directions, which remove permitted development rights that would otherwise be automatic. Two of those 22 are in Kenton: Northwick Circle and Mount Stewart. Brent's Mount Stewart appraisal confirms the count, describing that area as one of two designated conservation areas in the Kenton ward.

Harrow has 30 conservation areas and publishes them in four groups: Stanmore and Edgware, Harrow on the Hill, Harrow Weald, and Pinner. Six, eight, three and thirteen, which is the thirty the council says it has. None of the four groups covers Kenton, and Harrow's Article 4 directions all sit inside conservation areas, so there is no Article 4 direction anywhere on the Harrow side of Kenton either.

That is the practical difference. On the Harrow side, heritage designation is simply not a constraint on your installation and the decisions are the ordinary ones: which wall inside, where the condenser sits outside, how far the pipe runs and where the water goes. On the Brent side, the answer depends on whether you are inside one of the two areas, and Brent's written guidance shapes the position even if you are not.

Harrow's own Character Assessment of Harrow's Residential Areas describes the typical Kenton estate, around Kenton Park Road, as 1930s semi detached houses, predominantly rendered with round bays and feature gables over, some with mock Tudor detailing, occasional square bays, strong uniformity but quite plain. It adds that front gardens have largely been lost to forecourt parking. Inside the Brent conservation areas the same period is dressed up: Brent's Mount Stewart appraisal describes mock Tudor with deeply recessed porches distinguished by decorative detailed brickwork.

Those two descriptions point the same way. The front of a Kenton house is where the detail is and where the parking already is, so it is the wrong place for a condenser on either side of the borough line. The unit goes to the rear, and on the Brent side Brent's own guidance says so in writing.

The catch is the side return. On a 1930s semi it is the obvious position and on most of our patch it is where the unit goes. Brent explicitly advises against it, on air flow and noise grounds rather than appearance. If you are on the Brent side we design around that from the start, which usually means the rear elevation and occasionally a longer pipe run, quoted per metre beyond the three metres included.

Kenton was farmland until remarkably recently. Brent's local history service records that in 1721 Kenton consisted of a house, seven cottages and a blacksmith's shop, and that by 1938 all trace of the original village had vanished. Harrow's character assessment is more precise about what went: the historic hamlet stood at the junction of Kenton Road and Kenton Lane, and only Kenton Grange, now St Luke's Hospice, and the 1930s public house that replaced the Plough Inn survive from it.

What happened in between was two railways. Kenton station opened in 1912 on the London and North Western Railway's line between Watford Junction and Euston. The Metropolitan Railway's station followed in 1923, opened as Northwick Park and Kenton and renamed Northwick Park in 1937. Kenton Road was re-aligned into a wide suburban boulevard as part of that growth, which is why part of the old route survives as Woodgrange Avenue, and the shopping parades by the station are what the council now calls Kenton local centre. The houses went up in the 1920s and 1930s, many of them, Brent says, by a building firm called Costin's, who laid out the Mount Stewart estate on land Harrow School sold from its Lyon Farm endowment and named its roads after prominent Harrovians.

Three buildings in Kenton are listed, and it matters because permitted development does not apply within the curtilage of a listed building. The Church of St Mary and Parish Hall is Grade II star, listed in November 1993. Kenton Library is Grade II, listed in March 1999. The K8 telephone kiosk at Northwick Park station is Grade II, listed in June 2023.

Brent publishes an interactive policies map and asks residents to use it to check conservation area status: enter the address, click the pin, and it shows the policies that apply. That is the quickest way to settle it for a Brent side address, and Brent's extensions guidance is worth ten minutes of anyone's time before they buy anything.

On the Harrow side, Harrow's conservation team takes questions directly on 020 8736 6101, though for a Kenton address the answer is very likely that nothing applies. Either way we establish which council your address falls in before we quote, because the guidance written for one is not the guidance for the other.