Yes, with more paperwork in the middle of town and rather less at the edges. Twenty-seven listed buildings sit across the area, and none of them carry the top grade. One conservation area covers the town itself. Well over a hundred planning applications have gone in over the past couple of years, which is the plainest evidence available that people here do alter their houses. The constraint is real. It is also narrower than the town's appearance leads people to assume.
Of those 27 listed buildings, 25 are grade two and two are grade two star, with none at grade one. Listing is the tier that changes how you live in a house rather than just how you extend it: consent is needed for works affecting the building's special interest, inside as well as out, and that catches things which would be nobody's business elsewhere. Windows are where most owners meet this for the first time. Replacing rotten frames stops being a Saturday decision and becomes an application, and the answer will care about what the frames are made of rather than what they cost.
The conservation area is the wider net, and it is the one most buyers here will actually be caught in, since it covers the town rather than a handful of addresses. Inside a conservation area, the appearance of the place becomes a material consideration in its own right, demolition comes under control, and some works that would go ahead unchallenged on an ordinary street need consent instead. The point people miss is that this applies to perfectly ordinary houses standing next to the listed ones. Being unremarkable is not a defence.
Two scheduled monuments also sit within the area. That is the strictest protection tier in the system, operating separately from planning permission, and it matters mainly for anyone whose land runs up to one. If that is you, the conversation starts before the drawings, not after.
As for what the neighbours are getting on with, 117 planning applications were submitted across the area between April 2024 and July 2026, of which 44 came in the last twelve months. That is a steady stream of alteration for a town this size, and it is worth more than any general impression of how difficult the authorities are. People are extending, converting and reroofing here. They are just doing it through the front door of the process.
Practically, the question to answer before you buy is which set of rules your particular house sits under. A post-war house or bungalow east of the centre is a different proposition from something older down by the river, and the national permitted development rules do far more work in the first case than the second. Anyone planning a specific project should confirm the listing status and the conservation area boundary for the exact address, in writing, before exchange rather than after. The cost of asking is nothing. The cost of assuming is a house you cannot change.
Freedom to alter a home here lands in the middle of the road: neither a free-for-all nor a fortress. The rules bite hardest in the streets people move here for, which is a fair trade if you went in knowing about it and an expensive surprise if you did not.