Yes, across most of Melksham, and the ground is more of an obstacle than the planners. Well over a hundred listed buildings, none of them in the top grade. One conservation area. Shrinkable clay under every postcode. Permission is usually the easy part. The foundations are where the money goes.
Melksham has 167 listed buildings: none at Grade I, three at Grade II* and 164 at Grade II. Owning one means listed building consent for almost any change that affects its character, inside or out. That can include windows, walls, fireplaces and fitted details that an owner of an ordinary house would replace without thinking. Grade II is the common, lower grade, but it still carries legal protection, and the council's conservation staff will read your plans closely. Buying a listed house and then being surprised by the paperwork is a mistake that happens in every town, and it's always the buyer's mistake.
There's one conservation area, named Melksham. Inside it, planning control is tighter than on an ordinary street, so changes to frontages, extensions and demolition can need consent that wouldn't be required elsewhere in town. Check whether the house sits inside the boundary before you draw up plans for the front.
The neighbours aren't holding back. The council received 418 planning applications between April 2024 and June 2026, and 176 of them came in the last twelve months. Plenty of people in Melksham are changing their homes, and the planning system is processing them all the time.
The ground is the real consideration. The British Geological Survey puts Melksham in shrink-swell class 3 for clay, and that applies to every postcode in the area. Clay of that class expands when wet and shrinks when dry, which affects how deep foundations need to go and how they cope with nearby trees and drains. It doesn't make an extension unbuildable. It does mean asking a structural engineer before a builder quotes. The clay doesn't care what the planning permission says.
One listed building in the area is on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register. That's a building in poor condition whose repair may qualify for grant support and will certainly attract careful scrutiny. It has no bearing on the buyer of an ordinary house down the road, and a lot of bearing on anyone thinking of buying that particular building.
For most homes here, outside the conservation area and not listed, many modest extensions and alterations can go ahead under permitted development rights, without a full planning application. Anything larger, or anything on a listed building or inside the conservation area, needs the relevant consent. The sensible order is: check the listing and the boundary, then get the soil and foundation advice, then argue with the architect about skylights.
Your freedom to extend in Melksham is middling: open enough in most streets, tighter in the protected old parts, and the clay makes careful building sensible everywhere.