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Doesn’t sound right: landmark No1 Croydon is among the latest office block being converted into flats
Walk past East Croydon or along Wellesley Road, and you’ll spot them everywhere.
Old office blocks that used to hold call centres and admin teams, now sliced up into flats.
Plenty of people live in them, and a lot of those people will tell you the same thing.
The walls are thin, the rooms echo and you can hear the road at all hours.
It’s worth taking a closer look at why these flats sound the way they do, and what residents can actually do about it.
How Permitted Development skips the sound rules
Most of these conversions happened under Permitted Development rights. This is a fast-track route that lets a developer turn offices into homes without going through full planning approval. It was meant to speed up housing supply, and in Croydon it did exactly that. Dozens of blocks changed use in a few short years.
The catch is that Permitted Development bypasses the full planning process, so there’s no design scrutiny, no Section 106 contributions and until April 2021, no minimum floor area requirement either. Part E of the Building Regulations, which sets the sound insulation standard between dwellings, does still apply to conversions, but with a 2dB relaxation on the new-build target, though enforcement in practice has been widely criticised as inadequate.
So you end up with flats separated by lightweight partition walls that were never designed to keep noise out. The building was built as an office, where a bit of background chatter didn’t matter. Nobody planned for someone sleeping on the other side of that wall.
What residents actually hear
The complaints tend to follow a pattern. People hear their neighbours through the walls, sometimes to the point of catching whole conversations. Footsteps carry between floors. Doors slam and you hear it two floors away.
Then there’s the outside noise. Many of these blocks kept their original single-glazed office windows, which do little to keep traffic noise out. If your flat faces Wellesley Road, you’ll know all about it.
Inside the flat, the problem is echo. Office conversions often have hard floors, bare plasterboard and few soft furnishings, so sound bounces around instead of being absorbed. A small room can feel loud and boxy even when the only noise is your own telly.
What you can do inside your own flat
The structural problems are mostly beyond a tenant’s control. You can’t rip out a party wall or replace the glazing in a rented flat. What you can change is how sound behaves inside your own space, and that makes a real difference to daily comfort.
Soft furnishings are the easy first step. Rugs on hard floors, thick curtains at the windows and a few cushions all soak up sound that would otherwise bounce around. Beyond soft furnishings, some renters go a step further and fit soundproofing panels on a wall or two, which absorb sound within the room rather than reflecting it back.
They won’t stop your neighbour’s music coming through the wall, since that’s a job for solid mass and proper insulation. What they will do is calm the sound inside your flat, so calls are clearer, the room feels less tinny and your own noise doesn’t ricochet back at you.
For renters who can’t touch the structure, that’s a fix worth knowing about.
Where this leaves Croydon’s renters
The bigger fix has to come from tighter rules on conversions, so future flats are built to a proper acoustic standard from the start. That’s a slow process and it won’t help anyone already living in one of these blocks.
For now, the people in Croydon’s converted offices are left managing a problem they didn’t create. The good news is that small, affordable changes inside a flat can take a lot of the edge off. You can’t fix the building, but you can make your own four walls a much quieter place to live.
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