Managing the gap between buildings

Most attention in building management points at the buildings. The space between them, the access roads, shared yards, planting strips, bin stores, footpaths and the gaps where two blocks nearly meet, tends to be nobody's favourite responsibility. Yet that in-between land carries real duties and real risk. It is where fire appliances need to reach, where pedestrians and vehicles share routes, where drainage runs, and where a boundary dispute can sit unnoticed for years. Managing it well starts with admitting it exists as a thing to be managed.

The land has a job, even when it looks like leftover space

It is easy to read the gaps between buildings as residual, the parts left over once the blocks were placed. In practice they do work. An access road has to stay clear and trafficable for emergency vehicles. A shared yard has to be safe for the people and deliveries that cross it. A strip of planting may be holding a drainage run or sitting over buried services. A footpath has to be lit and maintained. None of this is dramatic, which is exactly why it gets neglected: there is no single failure that announces it, just a slow accumulation of small omissions.

The first discipline is to treat the site as a managed thing in its own right, not as background to the buildings. A building sits on land, and that land has its own footprint, its own boundary, its own features and its own obligations. Drawing that boundary once and hanging everything off it is the foundation, a point we make in draw the boundary once and let everything hang off it. Until the extent of the site is settled, no one can say with confidence what they are responsible for maintaining.

Where ownership goes fuzzy

The gaps between buildings are where ownership and responsibility most often blur. A single owner with a clear title has the easiest case. The trouble starts with shared estates, adopted and unadopted roads, rights of way, and the strips along a boundary where two parties each assume the other is looking after it. The result is land that everyone uses and no one maintains.

• An access road that the fire service relies on, but which falls between two ownerships and is gritted by neither in winter.
• A shared yard used by several blocks, where bin storage and deliveries are managed informally until something goes wrong.
• A boundary strip where a fence, a hedge or a retaining feature is quietly nobody's job to maintain.
• A footpath that is a right of way, carrying duties to keep it safe regardless of who owns the surface.
• Buried services crossing the gap, whose presence is assumed rather than recorded.

The common thread is that these are knowable. A clear record of the boundary, the features within it and who is responsible for each removes most of the ambiguity. The danger is leaving it implicit, because implicit responsibilities are the ones that are discovered at the worst moment.

Fire access is not optional in the gaps

The most safety-critical use of the space between buildings is fire service access. An appliance has to reach the building, and the routes it uses run through exactly the in-between land that is easiest to clutter. A skip left in an access road, a delivery vehicle blocking a yard, a bollard installed without thought for appliance width: each is a small decision in the gap that can defeat a response.

For high-rise residential buildings, the wider duties are explicit. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force from 23 January 2023, require responsible persons to share floor and building plans with the local fire and rescue service and to keep plans in a secure information box for firefighters. Those plans are far more useful when they show the site as well as the building, including how an appliance reaches the base of each block and where it can set up. The land around the building is part of the fire strategy, not a separate matter, and the record should treat it that way.

A record for the site, not just the buildings

The reason the gaps get neglected is partly that they fall outside the way most records are organised. Paperwork is filed by building, so land that belongs to no single building has nowhere to live. The fix is to give the site its own record, with its own boundary, features and responsibilities, sitting alongside the buildings rather than underneath any one of them.

• The boundary, drawn once and treated as the source of truth for extent.
• Features within it: roads, yards, footpaths, planting, stores, parking, drainage.
• Responsibility for each feature, named explicitly, including shared and disputed parts.
• Maintenance and inspection cadence for the features that need one.
• Known buried services, recorded rather than assumed.

SAMRISK gives every plan a free site shell precisely so this land has somewhere to live. The sites module holds the boundary and its features as a managed record in their own right, connected to the buildings that sit on it but not lost inside them. That is what lets a manager answer a question about an access road or a shared yard as readily as a question about a flat.

Maintenance the gaps still need

Even where ownership is clear, the in-between land needs a maintenance rhythm like anything else. Surfaces degrade. Drainage silts up. Lighting fails. Planting grows into sightlines and across access routes. Bin stores become fire-loading if they are not managed. None of this is urgent on any given day, which is how it slides, and it tends to surface as a cluster of problems rather than one. A planned approach, with the features logged and on a cadence, keeps the gaps from becoming the part of the estate everyone has quietly stopped looking at.

Own the gaps before they own you

The space between buildings is unglamorous, and that is precisely why it is worth a deliberate look. It carries access, drainage, boundaries and duties that do not disappear because no one enjoys them. The work is not complicated: settle the boundary, record what is within it, name who is responsible for each part, and put the features that need maintaining on a schedule. Done once, it turns the gaps from a source of nasty surprises into just another part of the estate that is known and accounted for. The buildings get the attention. The land between them is where the avoidable problems hide.