Yes, and the neighbours have been busy proving it. Most homes here sit nowhere near the listed register. One conservation area covers the old core. Applications go in steadily, month after month, year after year. The constraint is real but narrow, and it lands on a particular set of addresses rather than on the village as a whole.
Start with the register, because it decides everything else. There are 71 listed buildings in and around the village: one at Grade I, four at Grade II starred, and 66 at Grade II. If a house is on that list, alteration means listed building consent, and the protection covers the whole building rather than the photogenic elevation. Internal walls, staircases, fireplaces and windows all count, which regularly surprises owners who assumed the inside was a private matter. Replacing rotten timber sashes with something modern and sealed is the conversation that goes worst, and it goes worst most often.
One conservation area covers the historic centre. Designation does not freeze a house, but it does add consents that an identical property on the edge of the parish would never need, particularly around demolition, work to trees and anything that changes what the street sees. It can also narrow the permitted development rights people assume come automatically with a freehold. Anyone buying inside that boundary on the strength of a loft conversion sketched on the back of the viewing brochure should check the boundary first, and check it against the actual address rather than the general vicinity.
The useful evidence is what everyone else has been doing. Between April 2024 and June 2026, 172 planning applications were lodged across the area, 69 of them in the last twelve months. That is a village where people extend, convert, reroof and rearrange on a regular basis, not one where the planning system has quietly frozen the housing stock in place. What those applications do not tell you is how any individual one landed, so treat the volume as proof of activity rather than as odds.
Practically, this splits into two experiences. Off the register and outside the conservation boundary, a good deal of ordinary work sits inside permitted development, and the questions that decide it are the normal ones about scale, neighbours, drainage and what your ground will actually take. On the register or inside the boundary, assume consent is needed, assume the discussion will be about materials, and assume the timeline is longer than your builder's first estimate. In both cases the answer comes from the local planning authority for the specific property, and a pre-application conversation costs less than a refusal.
Freedom to alter a home here lands mid-table. The listed register and the conservation boundary catch a minority of addresses firmly, and everyone else is negotiating ordinary planning rather than heritage planning, which is a much shorter conversation with a much better ending.