Yes, and with less interference than most of the villages around here get. Nineteen listed buildings sit across the wider area, and only one of them carries the top grade. There is a single conservation area. Neighbours have been putting applications in by the hundred. The planning conversation here tends to be about your drawings rather than about somebody else's Georgian sightline.
Historic England's listing register covers 19 buildings in and around the area: one at Grade I, none at Grade II star, and 18 at Grade II. If your house is one of them, listed building consent applies to alterations affecting its character, and that includes work inside as well as out. Permitted development does not rescue a listed building, and the grade does not soften the process either, since Grade II is where most domestic listings sit and where most refusals of clumsy schemes land. For everyone else, the register is a small club they are not in.
There is one conservation area, at Heanton Punchardon. Inside a conservation area, exterior changes get looked at more closely, demolition needs its own consent, work to trees requires notice to the council, and permitted development rights can be restricted by direction rather than assumed. None of that makes an extension impossible. It makes the design conversation longer and the materials list less negotiable.
The live evidence is in the register itself. North Devon's planning authority logged 1,253 applications between April 2024 and July 2026, with 490 of those in the most recent twelve months. That is a planning authority processing a steady flow of domestic and other work, not a department sitting behind a locked door. People here alter their houses constantly, which is what happens in a stock built with room around it rather than terraces welded together.
Practically, the sequence is the same for any address and worth doing in order. Establish whether the property is listed and whether it sits inside the conservation area, because those two facts decide everything that follows. If neither applies, the standard permitted development rules do most of the heavy work for rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings, subject to the national limits and to whether previous owners have already used up the allowance. Then get the council's own confirmation in writing before anyone orders materials, because a builder's opinion about permitted development has never once been accepted as a defence.
Freedom to alter a home is one of the stronger things about buying here. Nineteen listed buildings and one conservation area is a light touch by rural Devon standards, and unless your address falls inside one of them, the constraint on your extension is going to be the budget rather than the planning file.