Yes, in most of Hanwell, though seven conservation areas and the clay underneath both get a say. There are a few dozen listed buildings, mostly at the ordinary grade. Clay runs under almost all of the town. Hundreds of planning applications a year show the neighbours are getting on with it. Getting permission is usually the easy part, and the ground is the part that needs the most care.
Historic England lists 28 buildings in and around Hanwell. One is Grade I, two are Grade II* and 25 are Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so changing one needs listed building consent on top of any planning permission. Altering one without consent is a criminal offence. For the great majority of Hanwell's homes none of this applies, because 28 buildings is a short list.
Seven conservation areas reach into the town: Hanwell Clock Tower, Hanwell Village Green, Churchfields, St Stephen's, the Cuckoo Estate, St Mark's Church and Canal, and the Hanwell Cemeteries. Inside them, Ealing Council looks harder at anything visible from the street, including roofs, windows, front walls and side extensions, and some work that would need no application elsewhere needs one here. Check Ealing Council's conservation area maps for the exact house, and ask whether any extra local restrictions apply to it. A dormer that would barely get a second look two roads away can mean a long conversation about rooflines inside the Cuckoo Estate.
There is one scheduled monument, the Hanwell flight of locks and the brick boundary wall of St Bernard's Hospital. That is the strictest tier of protection there is, and it only matters for land right next to it.
Ealing Council received 777 planning applications covering Hanwell between April 2024 and June 2026, and 360 of them came in the last twelve months. Plenty of people are altering homes here. To see how the ones on your street fared, you have to read the council's planning register one file at a time.
The British Geological Survey puts shrink-swell clay in Hanwell at class 3, and about 98% of the area reaches that class. Clay of this kind swells when wet and shrinks when dry, and trees and long dry summers make that worse. For an extension that means deeper foundations and a structural engineer's view on the design. It is a normal building cost here, not a reason to walk away. The clay is the one consultee in Hanwell nobody can appeal against.
Three listed buildings in the area are on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register. That register lists buildings in poor repair. Repairing them can attract grant support, and anything done to them will be closely watched. A buyer of an ordinary house nearby takes on none of that.
In practice, outside the conservation areas many Hanwell houses can add a modest rear extension or a loft conversion under permitted development, within its national limits and without a full application. Flats have no such rights, and inside a conservation area the rights shrink. Most buyers will find that both the house type and which side of a conservation area boundary it sits on matter more than their plans.
Your freedom to extend in Hanwell is middling. Most houses can be extended with care, and the conservation areas and the clay decide how much care each one needs.