Local knowledge with a purpose
Understand the building before changing it
Twickenham, St Margarets and Strawberry Hill share one place-based strategy, PBS3, in Richmond upon Thames’s Local Plan, but the council describes each through its own conservation area documents and village planning guidance.
Twickenham Riverside Conservation Area, designated on 14 January 1969, follows the Middlesex bank from Marble Hill Park to Radnor Gardens. Its appraisal, adopted on 20 November 2023, finds short groups of Victorian workers’ cottages, earlier mews-style housing on Orleans Road, semi-detached homes in Lebanon Park, taller Georgian townhouses on Montpelier Row and detached villas on Cross Deep, mostly in stock or gault brick. Lebanon Park’s Edwardian houses stand on the site of Mount Lebanon, a villa that burnt down in 1909.
Richmond: Twickenham Riverside conservation area appraisal, adopted 20 November 2023
The St Margaret’s Estate was bought by the Conservative Land Society in 1854 and laid out around three private pleasure gardens; its conservation area was first designated on 2 November 1971 and later extended. Detached villas in a mix of Gothic and Italianate styles dominate its southern end, Netherton Road is a cul-de-sac of two-storey yellow-brick houses under shallow slate roofs, and Kilmorey Gardens is mainly terraced. In the Twickenham Park area beside St Margarets station, Riverdale Road has large four-storey Victorian houses, while East Twickenham’s Cambridge Park was built in the late 19th century.
Richmond: St Margarets Village Planning Guidance SPD · Richmond: St Margaret’s Estate conservation area statement (No. 19) · Richmond: Twickenham Park conservation area statement (No. 24) · Richmond: Cambridge Park, East Twickenham conservation area statement (No. 21) · Richmond: conservation area statements
The Strawberry Hill guidance describes a leafy residential area of large older homes and 20th-century infill houses and flats, with shops near the station. Strawberry Hill Road and Waldegrave Gardens form two treed avenues of substantial late Victorian houses in generous plots, some now flats; Waldegrave Park was developed after an 1883 auction; the Strawberry Vale conservation area is a tightly packed group of Victorian riverside houses whose long gardens slope down to the river, with boathouses; and Mallard Place, built from 1977 to 1984, has fifty-seven flats and forty-five terraced houses by the Eric Lyons Cunningham Partnership.
Richmond: Strawberry Hill Village Planning Guidance SPD · Richmond: Strawberry Hill Road conservation area statement (No. 43) · Richmond: Waldegrave Park conservation area statement (No. 54) · Richmond: Strawberry Vale conservation area statement (No. 45) · Richmond: Mallard Place conservation area statement (No. 44)
The first local check
Check the address, not TW1, TW2 or the area’s name
Twickenham and St Margarets appear in ward names, and all three places appear in the name of a Local Plan area and of several conservation areas. Even so, neither a name nor a TW1 or TW2 postcode shows which conservation area, list entry or Article 4 schedule applies. Hounslow once designated most of the St Margaret’s Estate as its Old Isleworth Conservation Area; boundary changes in 1994 brought the whole estate into Richmond upon Thames. There is no conservation area called East St Margarets, and East Twickenham’s Sandycoombe Road is not Kew’s Sandycombe Road. For the exact house number, look at the council’s conservation map, the list entry and the Article 4 schedules, then at the title or lease and the planning history.
