Yes, and the town's lack of pedigree is the reason it's easy. There are no conservation areas. There are only a few dozen listed buildings, and none of them is top-grade. The neighbours send in planning applications all the time. In Paddock Wood, bricks from the second half of the twentieth century come with far fewer rules than bricks from the eighteenth.
The town has 18 listed buildings, all of them Grade II. None is Grade I and none Grade II*. Listing controls changes to the building itself, inside and out, so owning one of those 18 means listed building consent for almost anything that alters its character, and a conservation officer involved in the choice of window frames. For everyone else in town, which is almost everyone, listing is someone else's problem. There are also no conservation areas and no scheduled monuments inside the town's boundary, so no heritage designation blankets whole streets.
The neighbours are clearly getting on with it. Between April 2024 and June 2026 the area logged 1,385 planning applications, 550 of them in the last twelve months. That's a town where extensions, loft conversions and new porches are routine rather than exceptional. Those figures show how many applications went in. They don't show how many were approved, and nobody should read an approval rate into them.
In practice, a typical house here that isn't listed can often carry a modest rear extension or loft conversion under permitted development rights, which cover smaller works within set limits without a full planning application. Flats don't get the same rights. Larger or front-facing work goes through Tunbridge Wells's planners in the normal way. Before any drawings, confirm with the council whether the particular house has had those rights removed, which is common on newer estates. The bigger constraint here is water rather than history: about 18% of postcodes sit in the Environment Agency's highest-risk river flood zone, and an extension there can bring flood questions into the application that a heritage officer never would.
For extending and altering a home, Paddock Wood is one of the easier places around, precisely because it never became pretty enough to protect. Check the flood map before the design, and the planning system should give you little else to worry about.