For most Botley homes, the answer is yes. The village carries 41 listed buildings, and unless yours is one of them, the heavy heritage rules never come near your plans. Two conservation areas cover Botley itself and Swanwick Shore, and inside those the council looks harder at what you want to do. Everywhere else, the ordinary permitted-development freedoms apply. The overall position is middling: freer than a historic market town, tighter than a modern cul-de-sac.
The listed stock is real but narrow. All 41 of the village's listed buildings sit at grade two, the most common and least restrictive of the three grades, though restrictive is still the operative word once your house is on the list. Listing means you need consent for changes that affect the building's character, and that reaches inside as well as out, so a new window, a rear extension, or even shifting an internal wall can need sign-off. In a village of this size, 41 buildings is a small fraction of the total, and the bulk of Botley's post-war and modern housing is nowhere near the register. If you own one of the old ones, budget for scrutiny. If you own a nineteen-seventies semi, the list is somebody else's problem.
The two conservation areas are where the rules bite for a wider group. Being in the Botley or Swanwick Shore conservation area can pull back some of the permitted-development rights you would take for granted elsewhere, add extra consent for demolition or works to the outside, and give the council room to attach conditions in the name of preserving the look of the place. It does not freeze the area. It just means the paperwork is longer and the design gets a second opinion whether you asked for one or not.
In practice, the average Botley owner sitting outside the list and outside the two conservation areas has a decent amount of latitude. A lot of single-storey rear extensions and loft conversions fall within permitted development, subject to the usual size and height limits, and never need a full application at all. This is not a place where building work is exotic either: more than six hundred planning applications went in across the area over the past year, so the council is well used to processing them. The one job worth doing before you sketch anything is the cheapest one, which is checking whether your specific address is listed or sits in a conservation area.
Botley lands squarely average on how freely you can alter a home, and that is the honest verdict: a small band of listed buildings and two watched conservation areas, with most houses free to extend under the normal rules. Check your address first, then get on with it.