Yes, across most of the village, and plenty of your neighbours already have. Hersham has no buildings listed at the top grades. Two conservation areas hold most of the stricter rules. Planning applications come in at about ten a week. The rules are short in Hersham, and the builders have plenty of work.
Historic England's list has 25 buildings in Hersham, every one of them Grade II, with none at Grade II* and none at Grade I. Grade II is the standard level of protection, and it still counts. If you own a listed building, you need listed building consent for most changes to its fabric, inside as well as out, from replacement windows to removing an internal wall, and carrying out work without consent is a criminal offence. With only 25 of them spread across the village, most buyers will never own one. Anyone who does will spend more time dealing with Elmbridge's conservation officers than with their builder.
The two conservation areas are Hersham Village and West End. Inside them, Elmbridge Borough Council looks harder at anything that changes how a street looks: demolition, extensions visible from the road, new boundary walls, and work on trees. Some changes that would need no application elsewhere need one here. A house can be just inside or just outside a boundary while looking exactly like its neighbour, so check the council's conservation area map for the specific address. Neither the house's appearance nor the particulars will tell you which side of the line it is on.
The neighbours are busy. Elmbridge's planning register holds 1,219 applications for Hersham between April 2024 and July 2026, with 501 of them in the last twelve months. That is the volume of a village that keeps altering its homes. The register shows how many people apply. It does not show how many succeed, so the totals are evidence of demand for change and nothing more. Hersham pulled down its first church in 1889 because a better one had been built, and the village has been treating its buildings as works in progress ever since.
For most homes outside the two conservation areas and away from the listed buildings, the national permitted development rules apply. They let a house take certain rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings within set limits without a full planning application. Flats do not get those rights, and any earlier planning consent on a house can remove them, which is why the planning history of a specific address matters. Search the address on Elmbridge's planning register first. A neighbour's extension may have been approved, permitted development, or neither, and the register will show which.
Hersham gives you a middling amount of freedom to extend. Away from its two conservation areas and its handful of Grade II buildings, most houses can grow, and a steady flow of planning applications shows the neighbours are trying.