Yes, in most of Staines, because most of it was built too recently for anyone to want to protect it. The town has 99 listed buildings. Four conservation areas reach into it and the land around it. More than a thousand planning applications went in over the last year. The heritage is concentrated in a few old streets, and the rest of the town is busy building out the back.
There are 99 listed buildings in and around Staines: one at Grade I, five at Grade II* and 93 at Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so changing a window, a staircase or a fireplace in one of them needs listed building consent from the council as well as any planning permission. For the 93 Grade II buildings that is the ordinary end of the system. For the six above them, the bar sits considerably higher. Against a town of more than 13,000 homes on the council-tax list, 99 is a small, specific group, and the owners of those houses already know who they are.
Four conservation areas fall within the area around the town: Staines itself, Egham Hythe, Laleham and Thorpe. Inside one, the council takes a closer interest in anything visible from the street, and demolition, some tree work and changes to front elevations can need consent that a house elsewhere would not. Whether the house sits inside one of those boundaries is the check that matters most, and Spelthorne Borough Council's conservation area maps are where to make it. In a town where about 28% of postcodes are in the Environment Agency's highest river flood zone, it is also worth knowing which zone the house is in, because flood risk can come up for anything that adds ground-floor space.
Two scheduled monuments sit within the wider area, the strictest tier of protection there is. They matter mainly to anyone whose land borders one. For everyone else they are history, and some of it is very old.
The neighbours are not waiting for permission to feel brave. Spelthorne's planning register logged 3,223 applications between April 2024 and June 2026 across the area, and 1,371 in the most recent twelve months of that window. That is a town actively loft-converting, extending and rebuilding, application by application. From Edward the Confessor's grant until 1540, Westminster Abbey owned Staines outright and ran it as the abbot's home farm. The planning department is a more forgiving landlord.
For the typical post-war semi or terrace outside a conservation area and not listed, many smaller rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings can fall under permitted development, which means no full planning application is needed if the project stays within the national limits. Flats have no permitted development rights of this kind, and with flats making up a large slice of the housing here, plenty of owners will find that every change goes through the council. Inside a conservation area or on a listed building, assume the council needs to see it first.
Freedom to extend in Staines is middling: wide open on most ordinary houses, tightly held on the old core and the river villages, and dependent on which side of a conservation line and a flood zone the house falls.