You can extend a house in Stow-on-the-Wold, but the town expects to be consulted first. The old centre is a single conservation area. Well over a hundred buildings are listed. The whole town lies inside a protected landscape. People still apply here in large numbers. Stow allows building work for anyone prepared to write a lot of letters about it.
There are 128 listed buildings in and around Stow: one at Grade I, four at Grade II* and 123 at Grade II. Listing protects a building inside and out, so changing a listed home needs listed building consent from the council as well as any planning permission, including for work a normal house could do without asking. With Grade II, the protection covers the inside too, so the kitchen wall you meant to knock through is listed along with the front.
One conservation area covers the area: Stow-on-the-Wold and Maugersbury. Inside it, changes visible from the street, such as roofs, windows, extensions to the side and front, and demolition, get a closer look from the council. Some householder rights that apply elsewhere are narrower or need an application. The boundary includes Maugersbury, the village below the hill, so it gets the same paperwork as the town. The whole of Stow also lies inside the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which trims some permitted development rights everywhere in town, including outside the conservation area.
There are also two scheduled monuments in the area. That is the strictest level of protection, and it mainly matters if your land runs up against one.
Plenty of people still try. The planning register for the area recorded 2,102 applications between April 2024 and June 2026, and 922 of them were in the last twelve months. Whatever you have in mind for a Cotswold house, the planning officer has probably read a version of it this year already.
In practice, the answer depends on which of two kinds of house you buy. A post-war semi outside the conservation area keeps most of the usual permitted development rights, trimmed only by the protected-landscape rules, so a modest rear extension or loft conversion may need no application at all. A stone house near the square that is listed, or inside the boundary, or both, needs consent for things its owner would never have thought of as building work. Ask Cotswold District Council whether the house is listed, whether it lies inside the conservation area boundary, and whether its permitted development rights have been removed. Of all the questions a buyer can ask here, those three decide the most.
Freedom to alter a home in Stow is about middling. The edge of town is reasonably flexible, while near the centre almost every change needs consent.