Access Before Everything Else
A roadside unit lives or dies on how easily a driver can enter and leave it at the prevailing speed. We assess visibility splays, deceleration distance, the turning circle for a car with a caravan and a delivery lorry, and whether the exit forces a difficult manoeuvre across traffic. Where a scheme needs a new access or a modified junction, we take that to the highways authority before committing to the land, because a plot with an unachievable access is worth nothing regardless of how good the traffic figures look on paper.
Buildings Specified for Real Kitchens
Our standard specification is written from the requirements of an operating high-volume kitchen: gas and electrical capacity for full fryer and rotisserie banks plus spare, extraction sized and routed to meet odour conditions, grease interception and drainage falls that will not block, cold storage on independent circuits, a delivery route that does not cross the customer area, and a yard that takes a rigid lorry without reversing onto the road. None of it is visible to a customer, and all of it decides whether the unit trades on a busy Saturday.
Planning Handled by People Who Do It Weekly
Food-use permissions on roadside sites attract conditions on odour, noise, lighting, hours, waste, signage and traffic, and each authority weights them differently. We prepare applications with the supporting acoustic, odour and transport assessments included from the start rather than in response to a refusal, engage with officers before submission, and negotiate conditions we can actually live with. Across the last twenty schemes the average time from submission to consent has been under five months.
Leases Written to Be Understood
Our standard lease runs to a length an operator can read in an evening: term, rent, review mechanism, repairing obligations with an agreed schedule of condition, service charge with a cap, permitted use, assignment terms and break rights, all in plain language. Rent is set from the unit's realistic turnover rather than from an aspirational comparison, because a rent that only works in a perfect year produces an empty building in a bad one. Renewals are discussed six months ahead rather than at the last moment.
Maintenance on a Twenty-Year View
Every building has a planned maintenance programme covering roof, cladding, drainage, extraction ducting, grease systems, car park surfacing, lighting, signage and services, with costs projected across twenty years and reviewed annually. Extraction and grease systems are inspected and cleaned on a documented schedule because they are the most common cause of both closure and fire. Owners see what is due and when; tenants know exactly which items are theirs and which are ours.
Vacancies Filled Quickly
When a tenant leaves, an empty roadside unit deteriorates fast and attracts the wrong attention. We hold a standing list of operators looking for units in each corridor, keep the building serviced and lit while it is empty, and re-let within an average of eleven weeks. Where a unit needs reconfiguring for a different format, we do that before marketing rather than offering a compromise. Owners are told realistically how long a re-letting will take, including when the honest answer is that the location no longer supports the use.
