Land by postcode · BS area · BS20
What the open records say about the BS20 postcode district in North Somerset: recent sales, planning designations and controls, and the council that decides applications. District-level facts to read before you sell or develop a plot in Bristol.
Residential sales recorded by HM Land Registry between 2024-08 and 2026-07. This is market context for the district, not a land valuation: what a plot is worth depends on what can be built on it, which these figures do not show.
Sales in 24 months
1,050
Median sale price
£386,000
Median £ per m² of floor area
£4,333
Median, last 12m vs prior 12m
-1.3%
£390,000 → £385,000
Mix of sales: 32% detached, 22% semi-detached, 21% terraced, 26% flats.
New-build sales 2023–2024: 13 of 992 (1%). A rough proxy for recent building activity: these are homes sold by builders, not development sites.
For each designation on the planning.data.gov.uk register, the share of the 860 live postcodes in BS20 whose centroid falls inside it. This measures postcodes, not land area, and says nothing about any individual plot.
99 of 860 postcodes
North Somerset
29 of 860 postcodes
Portishead Court Farm Environs · Weston-in-Gordano · Portishead West Hill & Welly Bottom · Portishead Woodhill Road · Portishead East Wood
5 of 860 postcodes
1 separate direction recorded, each removing particular permitted development rights within a defined area.
No postcodes in BS20 fall inside: National Landscape (AONB), National Park.
Flood zones, tree preservation orders, local plan allocations, settlement boundaries and non-designated heritage are not included here and are checked in a full assessment.
12% of postcodes in BS20 are inside the Green Belt, so Bristol has land both inside and outside it. Which side of the boundary a plot sits on determines whether the Green Belt tests apply to it at all.
These are district-level facts. The free assessment checks your actual boundary against the same registers and the local plan and tells you plainly what they mean for your plot.
North Somerset covers 100% of the sampled postcodes in BS20.
Draw your boundary, tell us what you own, and an architect checks it against these registers and the local plan. Free, no obligation, and you get a straight written answer.
It depends on where the plot sits, not on the district average. In BS20, 12% of postcodes are in the Green Belt, 3% in a conservation area. On Green Belt or National Landscape plots a new home is the exception and needs a specific case; a replacement dwelling, a conversion or a modest extension is usually the realistic route there. Outside those designations the questions that decide it are whether the plot is inside or adjoining the settlement boundary in the local plan, whether it has its own road access, and what is next to it. A plot on the edge of a village or town with access has the best chance; an open field outside the settlement boundary rarely gets consent for housing whatever the market is doing.
Often, yes. 1% of postcodes in BS20 are under an Article 4 direction (1 separate direction), which withdraws particular permitted development rights, so an outbuilding, extension or change of use that is automatic elsewhere needs an application there. Outside those areas, permitted development applies to houses and their gardens but not to agricultural land or paddocks, where a new building or a new use normally needs permission or prior approval.
Developers look at three things before they talk about price: whether the plot is outside the Green Belt and any National Landscape, whether it sits inside or beside the settlement boundary, and what finished homes sell for. In BS20 the median sale is £386,000, and only 1% of 2023–2024 sales were new-build homes, so builders have been quiet here. A single plot usually goes to a local builder or a self-builder; a site for five or more homes attracts regional housebuilders, normally through an option or a conditional contract rather than an outright purchase, so the price you see quoted is not the price you receive.
There is no district figure for land, because a plot's value comes from what can be built on it, not from where it is. As a guide, a serviced plot with consent for one house commonly sells for around a third of the finished house value, which in BS20 would be measured against a £386,000 median sale. The same plot without consent, or inside the Green Belt, is worth a small fraction of that, and a paddock with no realistic route to consent is worth agricultural or amenity value only. The free check tells you which of those your plot is before you talk to anyone about a price.
Three places: North Somerset's local plan and its policies map for the settlement boundary and allocations, the council's planning register for what has been approved or refused on neighbouring land, and planning.data.gov.uk for the national designations. That is an evening's work if you know what you are looking for. The alternative is to draw your boundary on this site: an architect checks it against the same records and writes back within 48 hours with a plain answer, free and without obligation.
Computed from open-data records; district-level, not plot-level measurements. Sales: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (2024-08-01 to 2026-07-31), © Crown copyright, Open Government Licence. Designations: planning.data.gov.uk (OGL), retrieved 2026-09-05; conservation areas and Article 4 directions are made locally and published on that national register. Postcode centroids: OS Code-Point Open 2026.3.0, contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Place name is the most common post town in the sales records. Figures computed 2026-09-06.