For most houses in Milford on Sea, yes, and without much drama. The village holds 42 listed buildings, one of them at the top Grade I rank. It has a single conservation area, covering the older heart around the High Street. Fewer than one in ten homes here predate 1930, which means the overwhelming majority are ordinary later stock with ordinary rights. The heritage rules bite hard on a small number of properties and leave the rest more or less to their own devices.
The 42 listed entries are where the real constraints live. All but one are Grade II, the standard designation for a building of special interest, with a single Grade I property sitting at the very top of the tree. Own one of them and extending stops being a weekend ambition and becomes a formal exercise. Listing covers the inside as well as the outside, so a new window, a knocked-through wall, or a rear extension all need consent before anyone lifts a tool. The listed set is concentrated in the old centre, taking in pairs like 40 and 42 High Street and the house at 60 High Street, along with properties such as Bellevue House and Efford House. If your address sits on that register, assume every alteration is a conversation with the planning office rather than a decision you make on a Sunday.
Wrapped around much of that older core is the Milford-on-Sea conservation area, the village's one designated zone of the kind. Living inside it does not freeze your house in place, but it does tighten things where the street can see. What the front elevation looks like, what gets demolished, and how the general character of the area is preserved all tend to attract closer attention than they would a few roads out. It is a softer constraint than a full listing, and it applies to a defined patch rather than the whole village, so the question of whether it touches you comes down to which side of the boundary your front door sits on.
For the bulk of Milford on Sea, none of this lands at all. A typical later house outside the conservation area and off the listed register carries the same permitted development rights as anywhere else, and those rights already cover most of what owners actually want: a modest rear extension, a loft conversion, a bit more kitchen out the back. The friction is real but local. Buy an unremarkable house on an unremarkable road and your plans are broadly your own. Buy into the historic centre, or buy one of the listed properties, and the village's past quietly becomes a co-signatory on your building work, with a say on details you would never expect to negotiate elsewhere.
The verdict sits squarely in the middle, and honestly so. Milford on Sea gives you decent freedom to extend across most of its housing and takes a firm hand only where history has genuinely earned it. Work out which of those two houses you are buying before you pay an architect to draw anything.