Dunstable Road, Montague Road, Sydney Road, Townshend Road, St Mary’s Grove and The Vineyard all carry “(Richmond)” after their names on Richmond Council’s list of Article 4 Directions: streets where some of the permitted development rights most houses enjoy have been taken away. Add the borough’s 85 conservation areas and a view from Richmond Hill protected by its own Act of Parliament since 1902, and it is fair to say that this town checks before it builds.
That matters when you are weighing up battery storage for a Richmond home, because the planning question splits in two. There are the solar panels on the roof, if you want them, and there is the battery unit itself, which usually lives indoors or on a wall. Richmond’s rules for the first are written down in detail; the second is mostly about where you put it. This guide takes each in turn, from Richmond Council’s published guidance and the national rule as amended in August 2026.
Panels first: the national rule and Richmond’s three lines
Roof-mounted solar on a house is permitted development under Schedule 2, Part 14, Class A of the General Permitted Development Order 2015, as amended by S.I. 2026/896 from 27 August 2026. On a pitched roof the panels must not stand more than 0.2 m proud of the slope or sit above the highest part of the roof, chimneys aside, and they must be sited to minimise the effect on the building’s appearance. Inside a conservation area, the exclusion now covers only equipment on a wall, balcony or roof enclosure that fronts a highway. A front slope on a Richmond Hill terrace is treated the same as a back one.
Richmond Council’s own solar guidance says much the same in three plain lines. No panels on a wall that fronts a highway in a conservation area. Prior approval from the council for panels on a flat roof. And both planning permission and listed building consent for a listed building. The flat-roof step is a determination rather than a refusal: the council decides whether it needs to approve the appearance before the panels go on, so a flat-roofed rear extension in Kew or Petersham means an application first, not necessarily a no.
Article 4 on Richmond’s own streets
An Article 4 Direction is the one tool that can remove rights street by street. Richmond Council’s page on conservation-area directions, updated 18 June 2026, says that a home covered by one needs planning permission for changes that would otherwise be permitted. It lists the kinds of change the directions bring under control: extensions and additions, new doors and windows, painting and rendering brickwork, removing chimneys, replacing front gardens, and replacing boundary walls with hard surfaces. The list is introduced as “including but not limited to”, and it does not mention solar either way.
So in Richmond the summary is not the answer. Several directions cover a run of house numbers rather than a whole street; East Sheen Avenue and Victoria Road, for example, are listed by number range. A direction that removes roof-alteration rights does not automatically remove the separate right to install solar, which is why the wording of the direction for your street matters more than any summary of it. If your address is on Montague Road, Sydney Road or any other street on the list, open the direction itself, or ask the council, before a panel layout is drawn.
Where the battery goes in a Richmond house
The battery is the easier half. A unit in a garage or utility room makes no change to the outside of the house at all, which is why it is usually the first place to look on a Richmond survey. Where there is no room inside, as is often the case in a narrow Georgian or Victorian terrace, a wall-mounted unit outside is the alternative. In a conservation area, keep it off any wall that fronts a highway, the same line Richmond’s guidance draws for solar equipment, and choose a side or rear wall instead. We have not found a battery-specific planning rule in the council’s guidance, so treat an outside unit on a listed house or an Article 4 street as a question for the council before it goes up.
Ownership is the other check. At the 2021 Census, 62.4% of Richmond upon Thames households owned their home, 24.7% rented privately and 12.1% rented from a social landlord. For roughly a quarter of households, then, the landlord’s agreement comes before any survey, whether the plan is panels, a battery or both. Sizing is a separate question from planning; our guide to what size home battery you need works through it from your own usage.
Listed buildings: panels and battery as separate decisions
Class A does not apply to a listed house, and Richmond’s guidance asks for planning permission and listed building consent for panels on one. That can rule panels out, or at least slow them down. It does not have to rule out a battery. A battery can be installed on its own and charged from the grid on a cheaper overnight tariff; our guide to battery storage without solar panels sets out when that makes sense. Residential batteries carry 0% VAT until 31 March 2027 whether or not panels are fitted, reverting to 5% from 1 April 2027. On a listed house in Richmond, talk to the council before fixing anything to the historic fabric, inside or out, cable routes included.
The network edge Richmond sits on
The paperwork after the planning question goes to the network operator. Richmond’s town centre sits in UK Power Networks’ South Eastern Power Networks area, but the centre point is only 0.7 km from the edge of SSEN’s Southern Electric Power Distribution network and 1.4 km from UK Power Networks’ London area. Check your own postcode with the network operators’ lookup rather than assuming. Whichever operator covers your street, the installer notifies it: under G98 for a system up to 16 A per phase (3.68 kW), or through a G99 application approved before work starts for anything larger.
The order we would work in
For a Richmond address, the order is: designation first, then the direction if your street has one, then where the battery physically goes, then the network. We check conservation-area and listed status before quoting rather than after, and we would rather tell you at the survey that panels are a long shot on your house than find out at the scaffolding stage. Our page on solar panels in Richmond covers the roof side in more detail, including the council’s MakeMyHouseGreen partnership, and the wider borough picture is on our South West London solar guide.
Sources: Richmond Council, Article 4 Directions: Conservation areas (updated 18 June 2026) and Article 4 Directions register; Richmond Council, About conservation areas and Solar panels and permitted development; legislation.gov.uk, Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2 Part 14 Class A, as amended by S.I. 2026/896; Discovering Britain (Royal Geographical Society), Richmond Hill viewpoint; ONS Census 2021 tenure, Richmond upon Thames; HMRC VAT Notice 708/6; UK Power Networks licence boundaries (December 2024) and NESO GB DNO licence-area boundaries (May 2024); Energy Networks Association EREC G98 Issue 2 (10 March 2025). Read 15 and 16 October 2026.