Yes, and heritage rules are unlikely to be what stops you. There are no conservation areas. Listed buildings are a handful. Neighbours file hundreds of planning applications a year. The clay underneath the house has more of a say than the planners do.
Minster has 10 listed buildings: 2 at Grade I, none at Grade II*, and 8 at Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so any alteration to one of those needs listed building consent on top of any planning permission, and the bar for changing anything is high. With 10 across the town, the odds that the house you're buying is one of them are slim, and you'll know from the listing register long before you start sketching a kitchen extension.
There is 1 scheduled monument in the area, the strictest tier of protection, which mainly matters if your land sits next to it.
The planning register is the best evidence of what people actually do here. Between April 2024 and June 2026 there were 543 applications, 219 of them in the last twelve months. That volume says homeowners in Minster alter, extend and rebuild as a matter of routine. It says nothing on its own about which applications succeed, so treat it as proof of activity, not a promise of approval.
The ground is where the real homework sits. The British Geological Survey rates shrink-swell clay at class 3 across all of Minster's postcodes, a moderate hazard class that means the soil moves as it wets and dries through the seasons. Compressible ground reaches the same class across the whole town too. None of that is a reason not to extend. It is a reason to budget for deeper foundations than a builder might quote from habit, and to get a structural engineer's view before the concrete arrives, particularly anywhere near large trees.
In practice, with no conservation areas and so few listed buildings, most homes here keep their full permitted development rights, which cover many rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings within set size limits without a full planning application. Anything bigger, or anything on a listed building or near the scheduled monument, goes through Swale's planning process in the ordinary way. Checking the exact property's status before assuming anything is still the first job.
Minster gives homeowners plenty of room to change a house; the paperwork is light, and the thing to respect is the clay rather than the council.