Yes, if you enjoy planning committees. Over four hundred listed buildings sit inside the district. Twenty-one conservation areas overlap most of the older streets. One scheduled monument, for good measure. On almost every street the default answer is no, and turning that into a yes takes time you had not budgeted.
Take listing first. Over four hundred buildings inside the postcode carry a statutory listing. Ten are Grade I, twenty-seven Grade II starred, and the remaining four hundred sit at Grade II. Grade I is national importance and the strictest tier. Grade II starred is regional importance. Grade II is the local-significance tier and the most common by a distance. A listing applies to the whole building, inside and out, and covers anything the listing description names specifically. Which means the fireplace stripped out by a previous owner, the sash windows replaced with double glazing by another, and the extension bolted onto the back by a third are all planning cases waiting to happen, whether the current owner did any of it or not.
Then take conservation. Twenty-one conservation areas cover most of the older streets in the district. Pembroke and Princes, Regency Square, Brunswick Town, The Drive, Preston Park, Sackville Gardens, Montpelier and Clifton Hill, Old Hove, and Hove Station between them cover the streetscape that most buyers actually wanted when they moved here. Living inside a conservation area means the council can and will refuse permission for changes that alter the street's visual character. Which is anything visible from the street, and sometimes anything visible from the neighbour's upstairs window.
In practice, permitted development rights, the small changes that would be automatic in a 1990s cul-de-sac elsewhere, are limited or removed on many streets here. Adding a rooflight where the roof faces the street. Replacing sash windows with anything that is not sash. Adding a side extension in a design that does not match the terrace. Painting the front door in a colour the council considers non-heritage. All of these turn from an afternoon of work into a planning application with drawings, a heritage impact statement, and a wait. Around nine hundred and fifty planning applications were submitted across the district in the last twelve months. That is not the workload of an idle department. And the ones that get refused tend to get refused for reasons that read, in the applicant's ear, as somewhere between reasonable and exasperating.
One out of five on the freedom-to-alter scorecard. Which is what the numbers earn for a district where almost every street has heritage status of some kind, and the council is not looking for reasons to say yes. The house is yours to own. It is not fully yours to change. Which is baked into the price on the day you bought, whether the estate agent mentioned it or not.