Essexandlondonconstruction Reviews 

I don’t normally write reviews but I felt compelled to with respect to my experience with Essex and London Construction Basements, Extensions and Loft Conversions Ltd because it was so unexpectedly extreme.

I contracted this company to carry out a big project on my property. The experience has been one of the worst of my life. I don’t say that lightly as someone who has been through a lot of hardship in life.

Substantial work was left unfinished and my home was left damaged, months after the project was due to have ended. It was also left in an unsafe way for my young children.

As anyone who has children knows, it’s so difficult / impossible to get anything done on a day-to-day basis, let alone to find a back-up builder to finish works that your original builder didn’t complete and did badly. And most builders don’t want to touch another builder’s work. This has meant we’ve lived in a semi-building site for years with young children, which is not ideal.

Parts of our home we also haven’t been able to use for years in consequence, and it’s likely going to be years before we can use them again as we don’t have time or money to figure out how to finish everything and find a builder we can trust. We’re scared of builders and tradespeople now, and paranoid that we’re going to be taken advantage of again.

To say that our experience with this company has devastated us is an understatement. The disruption, stress, and financial cost we have been caused has been severe, and it has affected my whole family, including my young children. I’m worried we’ll never fully recover. Until you go through something like this you have no idea how horribly wrong it can go, and the pervasive ways it can impact every aspect of your life.

Based on my own experience and correspondence with other clients facing similar situations, this does not appear to be an isolated case with this company.

I would urge anyone considering this company to do thorough due diligence before signing a contract, and to think carefully before proceeding. Also be careful to believe the content on the company’s website - based on my experience of the company the content does not represent them or their work. It is contrived, curated and a lot of it seems to be AI-generated. The reviews on the company’s website also seem to be made-up by the company. The other reviews I’ve read on Trustpilot are more accurate about this company, as are some public client posts I’ve read on Facebook.

I recommend avoiding this company. I used them for various works at my house and it was such a negative experience.

The company is run by builder Marc Porter with his wife who apparently works in health and safety, Tara Taylor.

Marc was initially very helpful and friendly, before works started, but then changed considerably and became difficult, rude and impossible to work with once works had started. As time went on he became more and more difficult. It was exhausting and incredibly stressful.

The company / Marc ignored our plans and instructions, cut lots of corners, didn’t measure things properly, often didn’t use a spirit level, damaged our property (including structurally), upset our neighbours on both sides, threw away some of our possessions, damaged our possessions… it’s such a long list all the problems we had, I could go on. It felt completely surreal to be experiencing it as it was happening and you don’t realise how powerless you are until you’re in it. A lot of the company workers also smoked and vaped in our home. We asked them not to but they didn’t listen.

Marc never finished the works as he moved on to other jobs and kept messing us around about whether he was going to return or not. He / his workers came back a few times and did finish and correct a few issues but not many. Eventually we realised he wouldn’t be coming back to complete everything so we got another builder in to finish. The works ended up costing us so much more than budgeted because of the mess Marc made of the job and then we had to pay the builder who came to finish and he had to re-do some of the work.

It’s now a while since Marc worked at our property but I’m still upset by what happened and notice the bad workmanship that couldn’t be corrected by our second builder. I don’t know why people work as builders when they don’t care about the projects they’re working on. Maybe Marc has been doing it for too long and he’s lost interest, or he’s become greedy - I’ve heard that happens to many builders.

We hired Essex and London Construction for significant works to our home. What should have been a contained, manageable project has left us dealing with significant damage, substandard work which has caused endless issues, stress and disruption years later, and we are still living in a home that has not been properly reinstated.

We have had to manage the practical, financial, and emotional burden of living in a partially damaged and unfinished home for a prolonged period, while raising young children.

During the works we found it extremely difficult to get clear, timely, or satisfactory answers from Essex and London Construction about what was happening with the works, when they would be completed and why so many mistakes and delays were occurring.

We should have realised sooner than we did that the work was substandard, that Essex and London Construction had no intention of ever completing the works at our property and that they had many other projects that they were working on alongside ours.

To add insult to injury, I’ve recently seen that other former clients have written about their negative experiences with Essex and London Construction on Facebook and the company (Marc Porter) responded to the posts with a laughing emoji. The total lack of concern of the company about the devastation they are causing to clients is astounding.

This company looks the part - experienced, professional, successful. In my experience? Total smoke and mirrors.

I had a really bad time with them and figured out too late how they reel people in. Bottom line is they’re cowboy builders, just slicker and more calculated than most. Not good people, and the work was awful.

If you look them up on Companies House it’s pretty revealing - they’re in the red, have only one employee, and their registered address in Putney is literally just a mailbox at Mail Boxes Etc. No actual connection to the business or where anyone involved actually lives or works. A rented mailbox in a fancy part of London raises some pretty obvious questions.

They say they do basement conversions but they don’t actually seem to do them - they just seem to subcontract to specialists like Basement Structures.

They’ll happily sign a proper building contract (JCT, RIBA) which makes them seem legit - but once they’re in your house, they just ignore it. And there’s not much you can do. I complained loads of times and got either silence or attitude back. Being talked down to in your own home about your own home isn’t okay, and no builder should behave like that.

They recently posted on Instagram about having availability to take on more work. A builder with genuinely happy customers doesn’t need to do that - the jobs just come in through word of mouth and positive online reviews.

Their Instagram looks busy and popular. The numbers say otherwise. Hypeauditor shows an engagement rate of just 0.67% and an account quality score of 12. Modash puts engagement at 0.61% and estimates around 10% of their followers are fake, with another 10% suspicious or likely bots. For an account their size that posts as often as they do, that’s really low engagement. A lot of the likes and comments also look like they’re coming from friends and family rather than actual customers or others in the industry.

Honestly I think the whole social media thing exists just to pass a quick Google check. It’s designed to make them look active and credible to someone who’s considering hiring them.

Don’t get caught out like I did. In my experience these aren’t professional builders - they’re professional conmen.

The worst experience we have ever had with a company was with Essex and London Construction (ELC) which is owned and run by Marc Porter and Tara Jane Taylor, a husband-and-wife team.

If I could give zero stars for this review I would, but 1 is the minimum possible in order to write a review.

ELC is capable of good work and providing a good service to clients. We spoke to former clients before appointing ELC and visited some of their projects. We also spoke to clients who had projects running concurrently with ours who were happy with ELC.

Ms Taylor serves as the Managing Director and Health and Safety Manager of ELC. She has professional qualifications and accreditations relevant to the construction industry and health and safety, which is unusual for a UK domestic construction company. She has also worked, and still works, for various local authorities throughout the UK in significant compliance, health and safety, Principal Designer and building safety roles. Her credentials and experience was a key factor in why we chose ELC to significantly alter and improve our home.

Distressingly, ELC did not improve our home as the work they completed was excessively substandard, they damaged our property in extensive and severe ways (including structurally) and they did not complete the project. By the time they fully abandoned the project it had already overrun by 3 months.

We had agreed with ELC that we would move out of our home for 8 weeks to enable the build and they agreed to have it sufficiently ready for us to move back into after 8 weeks. However, we weren’t able to move back into our home for 5 months due to ELC not progressing the project and constantly having to correct their own serious mistakes. We had a baby at the time so it was especially disruptive to us.

ELC used incompetent and/or inexperienced workers on our project. They also did not supervise the workers or project manage the build even though we were paying ELC a fee to project manage.

During the build we discovered ELC had too many significant projects on at once and could not manage them all. Ms Taylor was also the designated health and safety manager for our project but did not attend site at all, nor did she otherwise ensure that health and safety regulations were complied with (which they were not).

ELC did not take care of our property throughout the build, they did not follow plans or instructions correctly (including structural plans), they did not comply with our contract with them and they excessively cut corners (including structurally, requiring significant and extensive remediation by other contractors).

ELC’s workmanship was extremely poor, they made an excessive number of significant mistakes (including structural) and they did not undertake the works in a safe, careful, compliant or structurally sound way which caused extensive structural and other damage to our property.

The liability of ELC for structural and other damage to our property, as well as substandard work and defects, has been confirmed by experts and other evidence. ELC are fully aware of their liability but they refuse to take responsibility for it or engage with us to resolve, remediate and/or compensate us for the issues and damage they have caused.

It was not just us as homeowners who were mistreated by ELC on the project at our property. For example, ELC did not pay subcontractors for their completed work. ELC also overcharged us for the work of subcontractors.

There were many other serious issues - too many to set out in an online review.

In our experience the owners and workers of ELC are dishonest, rude, abusive and aggressive.

Unfortunately we now know from other previous clients of ELC that our experience with ELC was not unusual - we are one of many clients who have had a severely negative and distressing experience with them.

When challenged during the build about incorrect or poor workmanship, ELC did not act as a professional building company would and try to amicably resolve issues. Instead, they usually ignored issues and evidence, denied responsibility or tried to blame others. On many occasions they were abusive towards us and our advisers.

Do not be deceived by the pictures of high-end, magazine-worthy work that ELC post on their social media accounts because they are not representative of many of the projects they deliver (a significant number of which they never complete).

Also do not be taken in by how friendly, helpful and charming they can seem - they won’t necessarily have any respect or regard for you or your property and they don’t care about the disruption, distress, stress and devastation they inflict upon clients who they decide to take advantage of.

We wish we hadn’t trusted ELC with our family home and we strongly advise others not to.