Mostly yes, with the caveat that the conservation-area lottery decides how much paperwork you do. Nine listed buildings across the area, all grade two. Two conservation areas, one of which covers the village core itself. One scheduled monument, which is the castle earthworks rather than a house anyone is trying to extend. The honest answer is that this is a place where the rules are real but not crushing, and where the difference between a quick build and a long one comes down to which side of the conservation-area line your boundary sits on.
On listed buildings, the brief carries nine for the area, every one of them at grade two rather than the higher protections. Grade two listing covers buildings of special interest that warrant every effort to preserve them, which is the lowest of the three statutory listing grades but still a meaningful constraint on the homes that carry it. If you buy a listed home you need listed-building consent for almost any change that affects character, inside as well as out, which covers windows, doors, render, internal walls, fireplaces, staircases and anything else original. That is a different planning track to the one a non-listed home goes through, with longer timelines and a heritage-officer view that the homeowner does not get to overrule. Only nine houses in the area carry that constraint, so for most buyers it does not apply, but for the ones it does it is the whole shape of what they can change.
The bigger structural constraint for the village is the conservation-area picture. There are two conservation areas in the area covered by the brief, one of which covers the village core of Rowland's Castle itself and the other covering Sir George Staunton Country Park to the south. If your house sits inside the village conservation area, the rules are tighter than for a house outside it. Conservation-area designation gives the council the power to require planning consent for changes that would otherwise be permitted-development rights, particularly around the front elevation, the roof, windows, render, boundary walls and the removal of trees of any meaningful size. Local councils can also bring in an Article Four direction to tighten things further on specific changes, but the brief does not flag one in force here, so the baseline conservation-area regime is what applies.
Practically, this means the village splits into two planning regimes in everything but name. A house outside the conservation area, not listed, sits in the standard East Hampshire planning regime, which allows the usual permitted-development extensions and loft conversions inside the published volume and height limits without a planning application, subject to the usual conditions on materials and overlooking. A house inside the conservation area starts from the same baseline but loses some of those rights, particularly on anything that changes the look of the building as seen from a public space. That does not mean extensions are off the table. It means they need a planning application and a heritage-aware design rather than a builder's standard pattern. Single-storey rear extensions, garden buildings and roof modifications are all commonly approved where the design respects the character of the area.
Verdict: average, three out of five, and that is doing the honest thing of putting it in the middle. The freedoms here are real for most homes, the constraints are real for the village core and the nine listed properties, and the difference between a project that takes three months of paperwork and one that takes twelve depends on which postcode and which side of the conservation-area line the house sits on. The rules are not crushing, but they are real, and they are the kind that get checked at the survey stage rather than after exchange.