Architects in Berkshire — chartered,

What planning rules apply across Berkshire?

The national ones, applied by six unitary authorities — Reading, Slough, Bracknell Forest, West Berkshire, Wokingham and Windsor and Maidenhead. Fees and permitted development limits are identical everywhere: £548 for a householder application, 3m rear on a semi, 6m under prior approval.

Sources: the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications) (England) Regulations 2012 as amended, 2026 rates; the General Permitted Development (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2, Part 1, Classes A and B, and Article 2(3). Read at 1 September 2026. Berkshire has had no county council since 1998; the six unitary authorities each adopt their own local plan, which is what varies between them.

Which council decides your Berkshire application?

Berkshire County Council was abolished in 1998, and unusually for southern England there is no two-tier structure at all. Six unitary authorities each act as the sole planning authority for their area: the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Reading Borough Council, Slough Borough Council, Wokingham Borough Council, Bracknell Forest Council and West Berkshire Council.

That matters practically because there is no county tier to fall back on for minerals, waste or highways coordination in the way a shire county provides. Every consultation is internal to the unitary, which tends to make determination timescales more predictable but local policy more variable.

What constrains building across Berkshire?

Eastern Berkshire sits in the Metropolitan Green Belt, covering most of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead outside the towns, and parts of Slough and Bracknell Forest. The disproportionate-addition test applies there in the same way as in Surrey and Hertfordshire.

The Thames is the second constraint and the one most often underestimated. Flood Zone 2 and 3 designations follow the river through Maidenhead, Windsor, Datchet, Wraysbury and into Reading, bringing a flood risk assessment, minimum finished floor levels and, on many sites, a requirement for flood-resilient construction and compensatory storage. It regularly rules out basements outright.

Heritage is concentrated around Windsor, where the castle, the Great Park and the historic town core produce dense conservation-area and listed-building coverage, and around the older cores of Maidenhead, Reading, Newbury and Hungerford. In the west, the North Wessex Downs National Landscape covers much of West Berkshire, adding a landscape and visual test to rural schemes.

What kind of work do we do across Berkshire?

• Rear and wrap-around extensions in Maidenhead, Wokingham and Bracknell, where post-war plots are generous enough for the 4 metre and 8 metre detached-house allowances to be genuinely usable.
• Loft conversions across the interwar and post-war stock of Slough, Reading and Woodley — usually a £274 certificate rather than a full application.
• Heritage alterations in Windsor, Eton, Cookham and Hungerford, where listed building consent frequently runs alongside the planning application and carries no fee of its own.
• Flood-zone schemes along the Thames corridor, where finished floor levels and flood-resilient construction shape the design from the first sketch rather than being added later.
• Rural and downland schemes in West Berkshire inside the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, assessed on landscape impact, materials and prominence.

Berkshire planning questions