steve hesmondhalgh

Enforcement: A Practical Guide for Planners

The complete toolkit for development management officers and consultants — when to act, how to draft a notice that holds up, and how to avoid the procedural traps that turn a straightforward breach into a three-year appeal.

Caravans, Mobile Homes and the Planning System

The full analytical framework for one of planning law’s most treacherous intersections — statutory definitions, the twin-unit problem, curtilage, enforcement strategy, and the 2025 fee regime.

It’s Just a Garden Room

Curtilage, incidental use and outbuilding enforcement — the part of domestic planning everyone gets wrong. Case law, appeal decisions and practical judgment from forty years on difficult sites.

Finch’s First Fall

A city planner discovers that rural planning is exactly as strange as urban planning, only with more sheep, fewer pavements, and an enforcement backlog that nobody alive can explain.

Penny Thornton: Holding the Line

The enforcement officer who always stood to one side of the narrative gets her own story. A horse called Moira. A cat called Poundbury. A caseload including a portable stone circle of uncertain planning status.

Finch and the Inquiry

Finch is asked to represent his authority against Eden West — 280 homes on land that smelled of turnip gas. Opposing him: Daniel Topolski KC, a man who speaks in the voice of calm water before a drowning.

Still Standing. Still Planning. Still Daft Enough to Care

Forty years in the planning system. The committees that defy logic. The sites that defeat gravity. The colleagues you never forget. Part memoir, part despair, occasionally baffled throughout.

Planning Permission Required

The second volume of planning memoirs. Arthur, Janet, the Chair of Planning hit by a scone at the Site Allocations Exhibition, and the client who paid for advice in bathroom tiles.

Bickerstaff: How One Barrister Lost the Room and Found His Voice

Roddy Bickerstaff KC has never once considered that the microphone might still be on. A darkly comic account of professional armour thinner than the ego it was meant to protect.

Castle England: Be Careful What You Wish For

A populist tears up the planning system and lets the people build. Funny, furious, and uncomfortably plausible — especially right now.

Stand Up, Speak Out, Calm Down

A public speaking guide for planning professionals — committees, inquiries, parish councils, consultation evenings. The butterflies do not go away. They just learn to fly in formation.

Beyond the Gate: The Real Guide to Farm Diversification

31 chapters from kitchen table to live enterprise, with an integrated Diversification Toolkit built from real consultancy practice. For farmers, planners and rural advisers.

Theo and the Town That Listened

Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes need a twelve-year-old’s help to defeat Karen Nimby’s Say No to All Nice Things campaign. For readers aged 8 and up — and any adult who has sat through a planning committee.