For most houses in Kennington, yes, and with less red tape than older villages carry. There are few listed buildings. There is one conservation area nearby. The neighbours file planning applications constantly. The harder part of extending here is the clay under the house.
Kennington and its surroundings have 14 listed buildings. One is Grade I, 3 are Grade II* and 10 are Grade II. On a listed building, almost any change that affects its character needs listed building consent, inside as well as out, and that includes windows, doors and internal walls. For the other 99-plus percent of homes, listing simply doesn't come into it. Fourteen buildings across a village of thousands of homes means a buyer has to go looking to find a listed one.
There is one conservation area in the surrounding patch, Iffley's. Conservation areas bring tighter control over demolition, some outside changes and work to trees, so a house inside the boundary has fewer things it can do without asking. Most of Kennington lies outside it, but whether a particular house falls inside comes down to the council's map.
The planning register shows how often people round here do ask. Between April 2024 and June 2026, 1,446 planning applications were logged for the area, 712 of them in the last twelve months. That is a steady stream of rear extensions, loft conversions and garage rethinks. A village of mostly post-war family houses tends to need more room once the family grows.
The ground needs more attention than the paperwork. The British Geological Survey gives Kennington class 3 for shrink-swell, and every postcode in the village reaches that class. Shrink-swell is clay ground that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, which means extension foundations may need to go deeper than the standard design, especially near trees. Get a structural engineer to look at the foundation design for any extension, and ask early, because it is cheaper to dig deeper on paper than to underpin later. The planners mostly care what an extension looks like, but the clay decides whether it stays where it was built.
In practice, most Kennington houses outside the conservation area can rely on permitted development for modest work, and anything larger goes through an ordinary planning application to the Vale of White Horse. Listed buildings and conservation-area homes are the exceptions, and they are rare here. Confirm with the council which category your house falls in before any builder draws a line.
Your freedom to extend is one of Kennington's real advantages. The planning picture is light and the main constraint is underground.