Yes, and people here do it constantly, but the answer depends entirely on which envelope your address sits inside. Seventy-four buildings in and around the town are listed. Two conservation areas cover the older streets. Nearly four hundred planning applications went in across the area in the last twelve months alone. The constraint here is not appetite, it is paperwork, and the paperwork is unevenly distributed.
Of those 74 listed buildings, one carries a Grade one listing, six are Grade two star and the remaining 67 are Grade two. Grade two is the workaday tier and the one most owners actually encounter. Listing applies to the whole building, inside as well as out, and to things attached to it, which is the part that catches people: consent is needed for alterations affecting the building's character, not just for the ones visible from the pavement. It sits separately from planning permission, so a project can need both, and doing the work first and asking later is a criminal matter rather than a stern letter.
Two conservation areas sit within the town, covering the town centre and Mary Street, and the Pottery Road area. Inside a conservation area, demolition and certain works need consent, trees get automatic protection, and permitted development rights are generally narrower than elsewhere. Councils can also withdraw those rights further by direction, so the sensible move is to check what applies to the specific address rather than to assume the standard national rules survive intact.
Two scheduled monuments also sit in the area. That is the strictest tier of protection there is, consent runs through national government rather than the council, and for most householders it matters only if the land in question is next to one.
The evidence that this is a town that alters its houses is in the volume. Across the area, 906 planning applications were submitted between March 2024 and June 2026, and 393 of those came in the last twelve months. Whatever the constraints look like on paper, this is not a place where people have quietly given up on the idea of a rear extension.
The ground brings its own paperwork. About 39% of postcodes here fall inside the recorded mining legacy footprint, and 33 postcodes sit directly over a recorded working. That is a search-and-report matter rather than a structural verdict: it means a mining search during conveyancing, sometimes a specialist report on top, and occasionally a lender or insurer asking a question the vendor did not expect. None of it says a particular house is compromised. It says the file will be thicker.
In practice, the town splits into two experiences. Off the listed register and outside the conservation area boundaries, ordinary householder work runs on the standard permitted development rights, subject to the usual limits on size, height and position, and a lawful development certificate is the cheap way to prove it before a buyer's solicitor asks. Inside those boundaries, or on anything listed, assume an application, assume a conservation officer has an opinion about your windows, and build the timetable around that rather than around the builder's availability.
Freedom to alter a house here lands in the middle: real constraints concentrated in the historic core, and a comfortable amount of latitude everywhere else. Buy in the old streets for the frontage, and accept that the frontage now has a say in what you do next.