Yes, mostly, with a few spots of resistance. Sutton has a modest number of listed buildings. Only one conservation area covers any of it. The neighbours file applications all the time. The bigger question is what is under the house.
Sutton has 64 listed buildings, none at Grade I, 8 at Grade II* and 56 at Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so even small changes to one need listed building consent from the council on top of any planning permission. For most owners in a town of post-war and inter-war houses, that will never come up. There is no Grade I building in the place, so the most protected thing in Sutton is very good and a long way short of famous.
There is one conservation area, centred on the old core of the town, and Historic England made Sutton town centre one of its first ten Heritage Action Zones in 2017. The council's own plan for the centre asks for its Victorian, Edwardian and mock Tudor buildings to be kept. Inside that boundary, demolition, front-facing changes and some works that would otherwise need no permission come under closer scrutiny. Outside it, the rules are the ordinary national ones.
Two scheduled monuments lie within the area, the strictest tier of protection, and they matter only if your land is next to one.
Plenty of people are getting on with it. The council received 972 planning applications across Sutton between April 2024 and June 2026, and 412 in the last twelve months alone. The neighbours are drawing on their houses. Look up the planning history of any house you are considering, and of the houses either side, on the council's planning portal.
The ground needs more thought than the paperwork. The British Geological Survey puts every postcode in Sutton at class 3 for shrink-swell, the published hazard class for clay that expands when wet and shrinks when dry. For an extension, that usually means deeper foundations, attention to nearby trees and a structural engineer's view before the builder prices the job. The town first grew on a band of sand where the wells were, and spread out onto the clay once the water mains arrived in the 1860s. The houses that followed the pipes are the ones whose foundations deserve a second look.
In practice, a house owner outside the conservation area can do a good deal under permitted development, such as rear extensions and loft conversions within the national size limits, and anything larger goes through an ordinary householder application. Flats are different, since they carry no householder permitted development rights, and with flats making up so much of the town that catches a lot of people out. A listed building needs consent for almost everything.
Sutton is middling for owners who want to build. The planners rarely stand in the way outside the old centre. The clay is the real constraint, and the cost of dealing with it shows up in the foundations.