You can, but in Richmond almost every extension is a negotiation. Hundreds of buildings are listed. Dozens of conservation areas cover the town and its neighbours. The clay under all of it moves. Owners extend anyway, with the paperwork to match.
The area holds 387 listed buildings: 19 at Grade I, 40 at Grade II* and 328 at Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, and almost any change that affects its character needs listed building consent from Richmond upon Thames council on top of any planning permission. Doing the work first and asking afterwards is a criminal offence, and the council does not need persuading to treat it as one. Richmond spent centuries as a home of the royal family, and the protections around its houses still behave as if one might come back.
There are 34 conservation areas in and around Richmond, from Richmond Hill and Richmond Green to Kew Green and Old Deer Park. Inside one, the council looks harder at demolition, extensions, roof changes and anything visible from the street, and some of the freedoms a homeowner elsewhere takes for granted shrink or disappear. A house outside a conservation area here is the exception worth checking for.
Two scheduled monuments lie in and around the area, the strictest tier of protection, which matters mainly to anyone whose land touches one.
The neighbours are not deterred. Richmond upon Thames council logged 1,548 planning applications here between April 2024 and July 2026, 611 of them in the last twelve months of that period. Those are people altering homes in Kew, North Sheen and the town itself, one form at a time. The council's online planning register shows every application on a street, including the ones that came back refused, and an evening spent reading what the house next door tried is cheaper than any architect.
The ground has its own say. The British Geological Survey rates the shrink-swell hazard here at class 3, a moderate rating, and the whole area reaches it. Clay that swells when wet and shrinks when dry means deeper foundations for an extension and a structural engineer's view early on, especially near large trees. It is a design question with a known answer, and Richmond has plenty of trees to ask it about.
Two listed buildings in the area are on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register, buildings in poor condition whose repair may attract grant help and will certainly attract scrutiny. They matter to whoever owns them and barely at all to the buyer of an ordinary house down the road.
In practice, the small freedoms that let homeowners elsewhere add a modest rear extension or loft dormer without a full application are narrower here. Half the homes in the area are flats, and flats need planning permission for most external changes anyway. Listed houses need consent for nearly everything, and conservation areas pull a large share of the remaining houses into the same queue. Most projects in Richmond start with an application, an architect who knows the borough and a long wait.
Freedom to extend in Richmond is poor, and the rules reach most of the houses a buyer is likely to want. Buy here for the house as it stands, and treat any extension as a bonus the council may or may not grant.