Planning and building regulation drawings in Eltham (SE9)

If you're on the Progress Estate, the conversation usually starts with what you can't do rather than what you can. That 1915 estate, laid out as a planned garden suburb, has carried an Article 4 direction since 1973 that strips out permitted development rights most other homeowners take for granted. Swap a window, change a door, alter a roofline, move a boundary fence: all of it needs planning permission there, even the changes that would be trivial two streets away. Off the estate, the picture loosens. Interwar semis and terraces with their consistent frontages still get judged against the established building line, so a dormer or a new elevation has to sit comfortably next to its neighbours, but the process is more familiar and less prescriptive.

There's a third layer too. Eltham Park's conservation area status shapes what's acceptable on its own streets, and Eltham Palace, with its Grade I listed buildings and gardens, sets a quieter backdrop for anything proposed nearby. None of this makes Eltham a difficult place to extend a house. It just means the right answer depends heavily on which side of Well Hall Road you're standing on.

Planning in Eltham: what to know before you apply

Greenwich validates and decides householder applications against a mix of borough-wide policy and area-specific designations, and Eltham carries more of the latter than most SE postcodes. The Progress Estate's Article 4 direction is the one that changes outcomes most: because permitted development is removed, work that would be a phone call elsewhere becomes a full application here, with drawings assessed against the estate's original garden-suburb character. Conservation area status in Eltham Park adds a second layer of scrutiny on materials and massing. The borough also runs Article 4 controls on HMO conversions in parts of Greenwich, which can affect anyone weighing up splitting a larger Eltham house into flats, since a conversion to flats needs planning permission everywhere regardless of that direction. We check which of these applies to your specific address before we start drawing, rather than assuming based on the postcode alone.

Applications are decided by Royal Borough of Greenwich — its planning pages.