The six-week notice every Canterbury hedge job ought to consider.
If your garden sits inside one of Canterbury City Council's 97 conservation areas, the conservation-area rules pick up where ordinary garden law leaves off. Most of central Canterbury is covered. Most homeowners don't know it. Here's the short version of what it actually means for hedge work — and the much shorter list of what it doesn't.
Conservation areas have been a thing in English planning law since the Civic Amenities Act 1967. They protect the look and feel of an area, not just individual buildings — which is why the rules sweep up trees as well as bricks. Canterbury City Council looks after 97 of them. They cover almost all the central wards (Wincheap, Northgate, St Dunstan's, Old Dover Road, the City CA itself), big chunks of the South Canterbury and Old Dover Road Victorian belt, the historic cores of the downland villages (Bridge, Bekesbourne, Littlebourne, Patrixbourne), and the chalk-stream river villages of the Nailbourne valley.
If you're not sure whether you're inside one, the council's open-data map is the authoritative answer. Search the postcode at opendata.canterbury.gov.uk. If your address falls inside a coloured polygon, you're in.
The actual rule, in plain English
Inside a conservation area, you have to give Canterbury City Council six weeks' written notice before you can prune, lop, top, or fell any tree with a stem over 75mm in diameter measured at 1.5 metres from the ground. This is set out in section 211 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 — hence the "s.211 notice" you'll see contractors mention.
The council has six weeks from the date they receive your notice to either do nothing (in which case you can proceed), or to slap a formal Tree Preservation Order on the tree (in which case you need a separate consent application). In practice, well over nine times out of ten on a routine hedge job, the six weeks pass without comment and the work goes ahead.
What does 75mm at 1.5m actually look like?
About the diameter of a half-litre water bottle, measured chest height. So a thick yew standard you've been clipping into a hedge for thirty years almost certainly qualifies. A privet stem in the body of a young hedge almost certainly doesn't. Multiple stems in a single hedge — each measured separately at 1.5m — can collectively push you over the line. Always worth a tape measure before a quote.
What's exempt
Plenty, actually. The list of exemptions is what makes most routine hedge cutting in Canterbury fall outside the rule.
- Hedging-species cutting. Trimming a privet hedge, a laurel hedge, a Leylandii hedge, a thuja, a holly hedge — none of that needs a notice, even in a conservation area, even if the hedge is old and well-established. The rule targets trees. Hedge species in their working role as a hedge are exempt under the Forestry Commission's hedging-species definition.
- Stems under 75mm. Young hedges, formative cuts, anything where the largest individual stem is below the threshold.
- Dead, dying, or dangerous trees. You can take down a dead tree without notice. You can do urgent work on a dangerous one without notice, though the council expects to be told within five days afterwards.
- Fruit trees cultivated for fruit. A mature apple in your back garden, kept and pruned for the apples — exempt. The minute it stops being a productive fruit tree, it isn't.
- Pruning work below 2.4 metres on commercial premises. Doesn't usually apply to gardens.
What this means in practice for most Canterbury hedge jobs: the notice doesn't apply. A routine privet, laurel, beech, hornbeam, yew or Leylandii hedge cut in a conservation area is normally exempt. The notice catches the awkward cases — the holly that's grown into a tree within an old field hedge, the mature oak standing in the corner of a Victorian garden, the apple tree someone stopped picking from in 2012.
The hidden traps
Three things catch people out.
Mature standards inside a hedge line. A lot of old Canterbury hedges — particularly on the downland villages, the Old Dover Road belt, and the Blean fringe — have one or two big trees grown up within them. Holly, yew, beech, occasionally hornbeam. They look like part of the hedge but they're individual trees over the 75mm threshold. Reduce one of those as part of a hedge cut without filing a notice, and you've technically committed an offence even though the rest of the hedge is exempt. Fine: up to £20,000 per tree.
TPO trees mixed into hedges. Separate to conservation areas, individual TPOs can apply anywhere in the district. They show up on the same council mapping layer. If a hedge line includes a TPO tree, that tree needs full consent (not just a notice), and the rest of the hedge work has to be planned around it.
Listed building curtilage. If the property is listed (Grade I, II*, or II), the garden walls, gates, gate piers and any structural features within the curtilage are also listed by default. Replacing a hedge with a wall — or removing a wall to plant a hedge — needs Listed Building Consent. Most of central Canterbury's terraced and villa stock is in this category. Trimming the hedge: no consent needed. Changing the boundary type: full consent.
How we handle it
Before we quote any conservation-area job, we check three things:
- The council's mapping layer — is the property inside a CA polygon, and are there any individual TPOs on the plot?
- The hedge line — any stems over 75mm at chest height that would need a notice?
- The property — listed building? Any wall/gate/railing work that would trigger LBC?
If a notice is needed, we file it on your behalf. The s.211 form is a single page; we attach a description of the work, a sketch of the hedge, and our contractor details. Six weeks later, the work goes ahead. There is no fee. There is no shortage of council officers — Canterbury's tree-and-CA team is small but functional.
If a TPO consent is needed, that's a longer process (eight weeks, fee variable depending on what you're applying for). We'll tell you that in the quote so you can decide whether to proceed.
Not sure if your address is in a CA?
Send us your postcode at hello@canterburyhedges.co.uk or call 07763 100 477. We'll check the council layer and tell you whether the notice applies before you commit to anything. No charge for the check.
Sources: Town and Country Planning Act 1990, section 211; Canterbury City Council tree-work guidance; Canterbury CC open-data Conservation Areas layer; Forestry Commission guidance on hedging-species exemptions.