Yes, and the planning constraints are unusually light. Seven listed buildings in the whole area. No conservation area to negotiate with. Hundreds of applications lodged locally over the past couple of years. The thing that will slow your extension down here is under the garden, not in the planning office.
The listing picture is about as unrestrictive as an English village gets. All seven listed buildings carry Grade II, the lowest of the three grades, with none at Grade I and none at Grade II star. Listing binds the building itself, inside and out, so an owner of one of those seven needs listed building consent for work that most people would call maintenance, and replacement windows become a conversation rather than a purchase. Everyone else in Lanner is unaffected by it entirely. There are also no conservation areas and no scheduled monuments recorded in the area, which removes the two mechanisms that most often catch ordinary homeowners in Cornish villages.
The evidence that people do build here is in the planning record rather than in theory. Between April 2024 and June 2026, 537 applications were submitted across the local area, 227 of them in the most recent twelve months. That is a functioning pipeline of extensions, conversions and alterations rather than a village where nothing moves. What those applications were for, and what happened to them, varies case by case, and the volume says only that the queue exists.
Ground conditions are where Lanner earns its asterisk. Every postcode in the village sits in an area affected by historic metal mining, and 76 of them have a recorded working directly beneath. The average postcode has around 17 recorded mine entries within 500 metres, with the nearest sitting essentially on top of some addresses. This is not the same as saying a house is unsafe, and it predicts nothing about any particular plot. What it does mean in practice is that a mining search is standard here, that a specialist report may be asked for before foundations go anywhere near a shaft, and that lenders and insurers will want the paperwork. Budget for the survey, not for the drama.
Practically, the usual permitted development allowances apply to most homes in the village, which means many single-storey rear extensions and loft conversions proceed without a full application, subject to the usual size and design limits that Cornwall Council applies like everyone else. The two things that change that calculation here are owning one of the seven listed buildings, and what the ground investigation turns up. Neither is a reason not to build, but the second is a reason to get a structural engineer involved before an architect.
Freedom to alter a home is one of the genuinely good things about buying in Lanner: almost no heritage machinery to satisfy, and a village with a busy planning record to prove it. The homework is geological rather than bureaucratic.