Yes, and the neighbours are already at it. Nothing here carries the top heritage grades. No conservation area is drawn across the village at all. Hundreds of applications go in around here every year, which is not the profile of a place where planning is a lost cause. The real constraint is the landscape you moved for, not a preservation order on your kitchen wall.
Historic England lists 21 buildings across the area, and every single one of them is grade two, the entry grade. There are no grade one and no grade two star buildings, which matters because those are the categories where alterations become an exercise in negotiation rather than an application. If your house is one of the 21, listed status covers the whole building rather than just the pretty front, and works affecting its character need consent in their own right, including things a normal owner would never think to ask about. Replacing windows stops being a weekend decision and becomes a submission. For everyone else, and that is the overwhelming majority of homes here, the listing regime is somebody else's problem.
The planning register shows what is actually happening rather than what is theoretically allowed. Between April 2024 and July 2026, 1,723 applications were submitted across the area, with 721 of those in the most recent twelve months. Whatever the local reputation for rural caution, that is a lot of drawings being paid for by people who evidently expect to get somewhere with them. Extensions, outbuildings, garage conversions and the rest are ordinary business here rather than a fight nobody wins.
Two things temper that. The first is the New Forest National Park, which much of the parish sits inside, and designations of that kind can narrow what falls under permitted development rights, so the sensible first move is confirming which rules and which authority apply to your specific plot before an architect starts charging by the hour. The second is the housing stock itself, which leans heavily to detached houses and bungalows on plots with room around them. That is the version of this problem most people would like to have: the space to go sideways, the neighbours far enough away to be relaxed about it, and no terrace geometry forcing everything upward.
Freedom to alter a home is one of the easier things about living here. Assume you can build, check the park boundary and the listing status for your particular address, and budget for a planning consultant rather than a miracle.