How likely is my planning application to get approved in Merton?

Plenty of homeowners in Merton assume planning permission is a formality — fill in the form, pay the £548 fee, wait eight weeks, done. But whether your application gets approved depends on factors specific to your property, your street, and sometimes even which side of a conservation area boundary you sit on. Until you see what actually applies to your address — free, takes about a minute, you're working with incomplete information.

Your postcode is just the start

Merton covers SW19, SW20, SM4, CR4, and KT3 — and the planning environment in each area is genuinely different. A rear extension that sails through in Colliers Wood might face serious scrutiny in Wimbledon Village, where Article 4 Directions remove some of the permitted development rights that homeowners elsewhere take for granted. That means projects you'd expect not to need permission actually do. Most homeowners don't realise Article 4 Directions even apply to their street until they're already mid-project.

Wimbledon Common adds another layer — it's Metropolitan Common Land with its own byelaws, and properties near its edges can find their options more constrained than neighbours a few streets away. The Edwardian housing stock around Wimbledon and the Victorian terraces in Mitcham aren't just architecturally different — they sit in different planning contexts entirely.

Conservation areas don't affect every property the same way

Merton's conservation areas — Wimbledon Village, Wimbledon Common, Mitcham Cricket Green, Cannizaro Park, and others — come with rules that go beyond simple height limits or material choices. The detail that matters is how those rules interact with your specific property: its orientation, its existing extensions, what neighbours have already built, and how the council has interpreted similar applications nearby.

Listed buildings cluster around Wimbledon Common and Merton Abbey Mills. If your property is listed, or even adjacent to one, the constraints multiply fast. But here's the thing — being outside a conservation area isn't a green light either. Flood zone designations, TPOs (tree preservation orders), and proximity to protected land can all affect your application, often invisibly.

The best way to understand what your combination of constraints actually means for your project is to check how similar applications near your property have been decided.

What your neighbours got approved (and refused) tells you more than any guide

Boroughwide approval rates are almost meaningless for your decision. What matters is whether projects like yours, on streets like yours, have been approved or knocked back — and what the reasons were. A refusal two doors down for a side return extension might signal a local precedent. An approval across the road might mean the opposite.

Most homeowners don't think to look at this before spending money on architects and fees. The approval record on your street is one of the sharpest signals of risk you can get — and it's the kind of intelligence that changes whether you proceed, what you design, and how you pitch the application.

With WhatCanIBuild, you can see the approval record for your street and what it means for your specific project — free, no signup needed.