The six-week notice every Margate hedge job ought to consider.
If your garden sits inside one of Thanet District Council's Margate-area conservation areas, the CA rules pick up where ordinary garden law leaves off. Almost all of Cliftonville is covered. So is most of the Old Town. Most homeowners don't know it. Here's the short version of what it actually means for hedge work — and the 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. Thanet District Council manages the Margate-area designations. In Margate itself, the headline CAs are:
- Margate CA (designated 1978, extended 1994) — the historic core around the harbour and Old Town
- Margate Seafront CA (1997) — the frontage strip
- Northdown CA (1985)
- Dalby Square, Clifton Place & Grotto Gardens, Clifftop, Ethelbert Road & Athelstan Road, Edgar Road & Sweyn Road, Norfolk / Warwick / Surrey Road, Northdown Road — the dense Cliftonville cluster
- Westgate-on-Sea has three separate CAs to the west, in adjacent CT8
If you're not sure whether you're inside one, Thanet DC's mapping is the authoritative answer. Ask me and I'll check the layer against your postcode before I quote — no charge.
No Article 4 in Margate-area CAs
Some CAs elsewhere in the country carry Article 4 directions that strip away permitted-development rights. The Margate-area CAs currently don't. That matters mostly for windows and cladding, not for hedge work, but it's worth knowing if you've read scary things about CA rules from other councils.
The actual rule, in plain English
Inside a conservation area, you have to give the 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" contractors mention.
Thanet DC has six weeks from the date they receive your notice to either do nothing (in which case you can proceed), or to put a formal Tree Preservation Order on the tree (in which case you need a separate consent application). In practice, on a routine hedge job, the six weeks pass without comment and the work goes ahead.
Ignore the rule and cut anyway, and the fine can reach £20,000 per tree. That's the number worth remembering.
What does 75mm at 1.5m actually look like?
About the diameter of a half-litre water bottle, measured chest height. So a mature holly standard that's grown up inside an old Cliftonville boundary hedge almost certainly qualifies. A privet stem in the body of a younger 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, which is why most routine Margate hedge cutting falls outside the rule.
- Hedging-species cutting. Trimming a privet, laurel, Griselinia, Escallonia, Elaeagnus or Leylandii hedge — none of that needs a notice, even in a CA, even on an old established hedge. The rule targets trees. Hedge species in their working role as a hedge are exempt.
- 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. Urgent work on a dangerous one can go ahead 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. Once it stops being a productive fruit tree, it isn't.
What this means in practice for most Margate hedge jobs: the notice doesn't apply. A routine Griselinia, Escallonia, privet, laurel or hornbeam cut in a Cliftonville or Old Town CA is normally exempt. The notice catches the awkward cases — the mature holly grown into a tree inside an old boundary, the inherited hornbeam standard in a Northdown garden, the apple tree someone stopped picking from a decade ago.
The hidden traps
Three things catch people out on Margate jobs.
Mature standards inside a hedge line. Older Cliftonville and Northdown hedges often have one or two big trees grown up within them — holly, occasionally hornbeam, sometimes an inherited yew. 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.
TPO trees mixed into hedges. Separate to conservation areas, individual TPOs apply anywhere in the district. 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 — a big one in the Old Town. Margate Old Town holds 2 Grade I, 10 Grade II* and 254 Grade II listed buildings. When a property is listed, the garden walls, gates, gate piers and 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. Trimming the hedge: no consent needed. Changing the boundary type: full consent. This catches out a lot of holiday-let restoration jobs.
High Hedges — separate rule, different route
If a neighbour's evergreen hedge is over 2m and blocking your light, the complaint route is the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 Part 8, not section 211. Thanet DC's High Hedges complaint fee is £650. Complaints are a last resort after neighbourly conversation; the fee is non-refundable whichever way the decision goes.
How I handle it
Before I quote any conservation-area job, I 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, I file it on your behalf. The s.211 form is a single page; I attach a description of the work, a sketch of the hedge, and my contractor details. Six weeks later, the work goes ahead. There is no fee for the notice itself.
Not sure if your address is in a CA?
Send your postcode to hello@margatehedges.co.uk or call 07763 100 477. I'll check the Thanet DC 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; Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, Part 8; Thanet District Council conservation-area designations register; Historic England listed building records for Margate.