Yes, and in Chadwell St Mary the paperwork is lighter than in most older parishes. There is no conservation area. Only a handful of buildings are listed. The neighbours are applying all the time. The rules on the surface are easy, and the conditions are mostly underground.
Historic England lists six buildings in Chadwell St Mary: one at Grade I, none at Grade II*, and five at Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so any change to one of those six needs listed building consent on top of planning permission, and the council will want the old fabric kept. For the other houses in the place, mostly post-war terraces and semis, listing does not come into it. A parish with a church older than the Norman Conquest has kept one Grade I for the history and left the rest to the builders.
Neighbours are putting in plans regularly. The planning record for Chadwell St Mary shows 1,051 applications between April 2024 and June 2026, and 458 in the twelve months to June 2026. Those are applications, a measure of how many people want to change their homes, and they say nothing about how many were granted. Extending and converting is ordinary business here, and the applications keep coming.
The ground is the one with conditions. The British Geological Survey puts Chadwell St Mary's shrink-swell hazard at class 3, and every part of the area reaches that class. Shrink-swell means clay that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, and on clay like that the foundations for an extension usually need to go deeper than the builder's standard quote assumes, especially near trees. Get a structural engineer's view on foundation depth early, and expect building control to ask the same question. The planning officer will wave the rear extension through more readily than the clay will take it.
Without a conservation area, Chadwell St Mary's houses generally keep their permitted development rights, so many modest rear extensions and loft conversions can go ahead without a full planning application, within national size limits, and a lawful development certificate from Thurrock Council confirms it in writing. Larger schemes, anything at the front, and any work on the six listed buildings go through planning in the usual way. One check is worth making for any house on a post-war estate: look at Thurrock Council's planning history for the address to see whether permitted development rights were removed by a condition when the estate was built, because that turns a straightforward extension into a planning application.
Freedom to extend is something Chadwell St Mary does well, with light heritage rules and plenty of neighbours already doing it. Put the money saved on consents into the foundations.