Teddington is a good place to live, as long as you can love a house more or less the way it was built. Two-thirds of households own their home. The typical household earns close to six figures before tax. Eighty-two listed buildings and a run of conservation areas have a say in your extension plans. The neighbours are what you pay for, and they have a lot of opinions about your rear dormer.
About 66% of households own their home, and the median resident is 43. The Office for National Statistics models the typical gross household income across the area at about £98,000 for the financial year to March 2023. That is an average over the neighbourhood before tax, and no particular family's payslip. About 63% of adults have a degree. People who own their homes, stay long enough to care and have the education to write a properly referenced objection give a town its civic life: residents' associations, packed school-gate rotas, and a planning portal that gets read. Richmond upon Thames logged 401 planning applications for the area in the most recent year, and every one of them had an audience.
The same audience is what makes changing a house hard. Teddington has 82 listed buildings, eight of them Grade II* and the other 74 Grade II, though none is Grade I. Conservation areas cast a wider net. The search area around the town takes in 28, including High Street Teddington, Park Road (Teddington), Broom Water, Blackmore's Grove and Teddington Lock. Inside one, the council expects changes to keep the area's character, and alterations that would go ahead without a planning application elsewhere can need consent here. Ask the council's planning team which conservation area the street falls in and whether an Article 4 direction applies, because that decides whether new windows mean a form. Bushy House has stood since 1663 without a loft conversion, and the street would like you to follow its example.
The Land Registry recorded 267 sales in the twelve months to May 2026, at a median of about £692,000. There were 114 flat sales at around £400,000, terraces went for about £940,000, and the 39 semi-detached houses sold for about £1,130,000. That is more than the 17 detached houses, which sold for about £1,060,000. Seventeen sales is a small sample, but in Teddington half a house outsold a whole one. The Office for National Statistics index put the average price down about 3% in the year to May 2026 and up about 9% over five years. Band E is the most common council tax band, and only 4% of homes are in bands A or B. Band D costs about £2,490 a year in Richmond upon Thames.
Private renting is a minority choice, at about 23% of households. Across Richmond upon Thames, typical private rent was about £2,310 a month in April 2026, up about 6% on a year earlier. That is a borough-wide mean from the Office for National Statistics index, so it does not describe Teddington streets alone. A two-bed in the borough averaged about £2,200.
On the council tax valuation list, about 46% of dwellings are flats, 28% are terraced houses, 16% are semi-detached and 7% are detached. About 45% were built before 1930. Energy certificates rate about half the certificated stock at A to C and 13% at E or worse. About 81% of homes heat with mains gas. Old houses in conservation areas tend to have exactly the windows the energy assessor wants replaced and the planning officer wants kept, and both of them can block you.
Teddington station is in the middle of town, and Hampton Wick, Strawberry Hill and Fulwell are close. On census day in March 2021, about 61% of working residents worked mainly from home and about 5% took the train. That count came in the middle of lockdown, so the commuter share has almost certainly recovered. The national access-node data counts 75 bus stops, averaging 288 weekday departures and about 15 in the peak hour, and 66 of the 67 stops with timetable data have a weekend service. Gigabit broadband reaches about 88% of premises.
Teddington is a Thames lock town, and the river is where its flood risk comes from. In the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 9% is in Zone 3 and another 9% in Zone 2, and about 22% falls inside the zone with climate change allowed for. On the wider postcode measure, about 16% of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood indicator, surface water included. The Environment Agency has 16 recorded flood events, the most recent in January 2003, when the main river overtopped its channel with no raised defences in place. The riverside flats were sold on the view of the water, and on the flood map they have the water as a neighbour too.
The Metropolitan Police area figures give a published rate of about 61 crimes per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 18% below the Richmond upon Thames average. The mix is the telling part. Anti-social behaviour makes up about a quarter of recorded crime, against 16% nationally, and violence and sexual offences about 24%, against 35% nationally. In a town this involved, being a nuisance is the thing that gets reported.
The average home is about 130 metres from green space, with about 30 green spaces within a kilometre, and the nearest water is about 420 metres away. Bushy Park, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, is on the doorstep. Lord North lived in Bushy House for over twenty years. The Duke of Clarence lived there with Dorothy Jordan before he became William IV. From 1902 the National Physical Laboratory worked out of the same building and built the first accurate atomic clock there. A town that measures time that precisely also notices when your scaffolding overstays.
Teddington's list of residents, born or settled, takes in Benny Hill, Julian Clary, Keira Knightley, Mo Farah and Jed Mercurio. That covers innuendo, endurance and the internal investigation, so the neighbours are fairly representative.
Overall, Teddington is better than average. It suits buyers who want a park at the end of the road and neighbours who turn up, and who are happy to live in the house the Edwardians designed. If you are buying with a design-and-build quote already in your pocket, the people who make this place work will be the ones reading your application.