Yes, and with less paperwork than most villages its age. There are only a handful of listed buildings. There is no conservation area. The neighbours file planning applications at a steady rate. The main thing standing between you and a kitchen extension is the ground underneath it.
Burghfield has 3 listed buildings. None is Grade I, 1 is Grade II* and 2 are Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, and any change that affects its character needs listed building consent on top of any ordinary planning permission. If the house you're looking at is one of the three, you already know it, because the estate agent will have mentioned it twice. If it isn't, listing isn't your problem. There is no conservation area here either, so the extra controls on windows, roofs, cladding and demolition that come with one don't apply. A village that goes back beyond Domesday has left remarkably little red tape behind.
The planning register shows how often people use that freedom. In the area covered by the planning data, 600 applications were logged between February 2024 and June 2026, and 273 of them fell in the last twelve months. That volume says nothing about how many were approved, and it shouldn't be read that way. What it does show is that people here extend, convert and alter their houses as a matter of routine. Loft conversions and side extensions are a normal topic of conversation over the fence, not a battle with a heritage committee.
The ground asks for more care than the paperwork does. The British Geological Survey's shrink-swell hazard reaches class 3 in parts of Burghfield, and about 17% of the area's postcodes sit at that class or above. This is a published hazard class, not a verdict on the village. It means clay soils that expand when wet and shrink when dry, which matters for new foundations, especially near trees. In practice, an extension may need deeper foundations than the builder's standard quote assumes, and a structural engineer should look at the site before the drawings are final. That costs you a site visit now rather than cracks later.
For most houses here, the practical route starts with permitted development: the national rights that let many rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings go ahead within set size limits without a full planning application. Burghfield's lack of a conservation area means those rights generally apply as standard. They can still be removed on a particular estate by conditions attached to its original permission, or by a local direction. So check the property's planning history with West Berkshire before assuming the bigger kitchen doesn't need permission. Anything beyond the limits goes through ordinary householder planning, which is where most of those applications on the register came from.
For freedom to extend, Burghfield is one of the easiest villages around: very little heritage control and no conservation area. The one serious conversation is with an engineer about foundations, not with a planning officer about sash windows.