Yes, Tilbury is one of the easier places in Thurrock to extend a home, because very little of it is protected. The town has only a handful of listed buildings. It has no conservation area. Its one scheduled monument is a fort on the riverbank, well away from the terraces. The thing most likely to slow a builder down here is the ground underneath, which matters more than any planning officer.
Historic England lists four buildings in Tilbury: two at Grade II* and two at Grade II, with none at Grade I. Listing means any change that affects a building's character, inside or out, needs listed building consent on top of ordinary planning, and replacing windows or knocking through a wall counts. With four in a town of terraced streets, the odds that your house is one of them are slim, and the conveyancing search will settle it either way.
There is one scheduled monument in the area, Tilbury Fort, which carries the strictest protection there is. It matters mainly to anyone building on land close to it, and the town's housing was laid out well clear of the riverside fortifications.
The neighbours have been busy. Thurrock Council received 297 planning applications across the area between April 2024 and June 2026, 102 of them in the last twelve months of that window. That is a town where people get on with rear extensions, loft rooms and conversions as a matter of routine. Daniel Defoe ran a brick and tile works on the Tilbury marshes in 1696, and the place has been building on itself without much ceremony ever since.
The ground is the part that needs care. The British Geological Survey puts the whole area in class 3 for shrink-swell, meaning clay soils that expand when wet and shrink when dry, and it rates compressible ground at the same class across the whole area, which fits a town built on former marsh. Neither is a reason to abandon an extension. Both are reasons to have a structural engineer specify the foundations, which may need to go deeper than a builder's default, and to budget for that before the drawings are finished.
With no conservation area in the town and few listed buildings, most single-storey rear extensions and many loft conversions on ordinary houses can fall under permitted development, the national rights that let certain work go ahead without a full planning application. Flats have no such rights, and about 28% of Tilbury's homes are flats. West Tilbury, the village up on the ridge that this page also covers, does have its own conservation area, and the rules there are tighter. Ask Thurrock Council for a lawful development certificate on any permitted-development scheme and get it in writing before the builder starts, because the confirmation is cheap and the alternative is knocking it down.
Tilbury is about as free a place to extend a home as Thurrock offers, light on red tape and heavy only on clay. Plan the foundations properly and the rest is largely up to you.