Bromley is one of London's larger boroughs, stretching from suburban streets in BR1 to Green Belt land deep into BR6 and BR7. That variety is exactly what makes answering this question so difficult — your approval odds in Bromley depend heavily on factors most homeowners don't even know to look for. If you want to cut through the guesswork quickly, WhatCanIBuild can show you what's actually been approved and refused near your property.
The short version
- Bromley has significant Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land — the rules in these areas are much stricter
- Your street, your property type, and your planning history all affect your chances in ways a general guide won't tell you
- Most homeowners only discover the complications after they've submitted
It's not just about what you want to build
Most people approach planning permission thinking it's mainly about size. Build within certain limits, tick the right boxes, and you'll be fine. But Bromley's planning landscape is far more layered than that.
Are you in a conservation area? Subject to an Article 4 Direction? Near a listed building? On Metropolitan Open Land rather than standard residential land? Each of these changes the game — sometimes significantly. And here's the thing: two houses on the same road can sit under completely different planning constraints depending on which side of an invisible boundary they fall on.
Most homeowners don't realise their property carries any of these designations until a planning officer raises them. By that point, the application is already in.
Green Belt is a category of its own
Bromley has a large amount of Green Belt land, and if your property sits within or adjacent to it, the rules tighten considerably. Permitted development rights — the freedoms that let many homeowners build without applying at all — are restricted in the Green Belt. What's straightforward for a neighbour in Bromley town centre can be a much harder conversation for someone in the BR6 or BR7 postcode area.
But it's not just whether you're in the Green Belt. It's how your specific project interacts with local Green Belt policy, what's been approved or refused nearby, and whether there are precedents on your street that either help or hurt your case.
Worth knowing
Being just outside the Green Belt doesn't mean you're in the clear. Metropolitan Open Land carries similar restrictions, and its boundaries aren't always obvious from looking at a map.
What the approval rate doesn't tell you
You might read that planning approval rates nationally sit somewhere in the high eighties, percentage-wise. That sounds reassuring. It shouldn't be.
Aggregate approval rates include everything from straightforward applications that were always going to pass, to heavily negotiated projects that changed significantly before being granted. They don't tell you anything about your specific project type, your specific street, or whether the combination of constraints on your property makes your application more or less likely to succeed.
The best way to understand your actual approval odds — not the borough average, but what similar projects near you have achieved — is to check what's actually happened on the ground. WhatCanIBuild pulls together nearby decisions, refusals, and the reasons behind them, so you're not flying blind.
What you actually need to know before applying
The difference between a successful application and an expensive refusal often comes down to things that never appear in general planning guides: what a neighbour's rejected application said, which constraint triggered a refusal three streets away, whether your property type has a pattern of approvals or problems in Bromley specifically.
WhatCanIBuild is built to surface exactly this — the granular, property-level picture that tells you what your application is actually up against before you spend money finding out the hard way.
Want a detailed planning report?
Get a personalised report covering constraints, precedents, and approval odds for your project.
See a sample report