Hammersmith, St John's Wood, Richmond and Wimbledon: What to Expect

Hammersmith, St John's Wood, Richmond and Wimbledon each have a distinct character, but share a common thread: a high proportion of larger, detached or semi-detached period homes alongside the more familiar London terrace.

Larger footprints, larger projects

Compared with the tighter terraces further into central London, houses in Richmond and Wimbledon in particular tend to have more garden and side access, which opens up options — wraparound extensions, garden studios and larger loft conversions are all more straightforward where there's room to build without touching a party wall on both sides.

St John's Wood: villas and conservation

St John's Wood has a notable stock of large villas and mansion blocks, with substantial conservation area coverage protecting the area's distinctive character. Semi-detached villa extensions here often need careful attention to how the addition reads from the street, since the conservation area designation specifically protects that character.

Richmond and Wimbledon: green belt and conservation villages

Both Richmond and Wimbledon include conservation villages and areas close to green belt or protected open land, which can bring additional planning constraints beyond the standard conservation area rules — particularly for anything visible from the common, the park, or the river in Richmond's case. Checking a property's specific designation before designing an extension avoids redesigning after a planning refusal.

Hammersmith: a more mixed picture

Hammersmith has more variety — terraces close to the river with their own conservation considerations, alongside later Victorian and Edwardian streets further from the water with more conventional permitted development rights. The riverside stretches share some of the flood-zone considerations relevant in Putney and Fulham.

What ties these four together

The bigger the plot, the more design freedom — but also, often, the more scrutiny from planning where a conservation area, green belt proximity or a park boundary is involved. A short check of the specific designations for a property, before committing to a design, is worth doing before anything else.