Richmond is the most heritage-constrained borough in London outside Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, and the constraints come in layers that stack on top of each other. If you're planning any external installation here, assume the process takes longer than a friend's did in a neighbouring borough.
First, sheer conservation coverage: Richmond has more conservation areas than any other London borough — published figures range from 72 to 85 depending on how sub-areas are counted, and the council maintains well over a hundred separate Article 4 directions locally. Richmond Hill, Richmond Riverside, Kew Green, Petersham, Ham Common, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham riverside and Barnes are all designated.
Second, a borough-wide Article 4 direction on basement development. It doesn't touch solar or heat pumps directly, but it tells you something useful about how actively this council manages external change.
Third — and unique to Richmond — statutory protected views. The view from Richmond Hill is protected by its own Act of Parliament, and Kew Green sits within the Royal Botanic Gardens World Heritage Site and its buffer zone. Anything visible from those sightlines attracts design scrutiny well beyond ordinary conservation area rules.
The practical upshot is that Richmond is the borough where a pre-application enquiry most reliably pays for itself. Because directions here are held locally rather than published to the national dataset, generic online address checkers frequently return incomplete answers for Richmond addresses — the council's own interactive map is the only source worth relying on.
The housing stock itself is favourable: substantial Victorian and Georgian houses with real gardens, so boundary distance for a heat pump is rarely the constraint. The constraint is visibility. A unit or array on a rear elevation invisible from any protected view is a very different application from the same equipment on a frontage facing Richmond Hill or the river.
Riverside properties carry one extra consideration worth raising with your installer: flood risk. Much of Richmond's riverside sits in a flood zone, and siting sensitive plant — a heat pump's outdoor unit, an inverter, a battery — needs to account for that rather than defaulting to ground level.
For costs, grants and how the national rules work, see the heat pump guide, solar guide, air conditioning guide and insulation guide.