Yes, and you will be doing it with an audience. There are 159 listed buildings in and around the town. Three conservation areas sit over the top of them. Two scheduled monuments mark ground nobody is touching. Hundreds of people have applied to alter something here anyway, which is the useful part: this is a town where changes happen slowly rather than one where they are forbidden.
The listing schedule carries 159 entries for this area, of which one is grade one, one is grade two star, and 157 are grade two. Listing covers the whole building rather than the pretty front of it, inside and out, along with anything fixed to it and often structures in the curtilage. The internal wall you assumed was yours to knock through is included. Listed building consent runs separately from planning permission, and a job can need both, which is two sets of drawings and two sets of waiting. Most buyers here will not end up owning one of the 159. Rather more will end up living next to one.
Three conservation areas cover the town and its edges: Swanage, Herston just west of the town, and Langton Matravers. Inside a conservation area the ordinary rules tighten. Demolition, alterations visible from the street and works to trees all attract additional control, and a local authority has the power to strip out permitted development rights within a designated area by direction. Whether one applies to your street is a question for the planning authority rather than the estate agent, who will describe the whole business as character.
Two scheduled monuments sit within the area. That is the strictest protection tier in the system, and it matters mainly if your boundary touches one, at which point consent stops being a local matter and the answer to most proposals is no.
People clearly do build here regardless. Between April 2024 and July 2026, 461 planning applications were lodged across the area, 191 of them in the last twelve months. That is a continuous flow of extensions, loft conversions and alterations moving through the system in a town of this size, which is the honest counterweight to the constraint list above. What the record does not tell you is how any of them landed, and anyone quoting you an approval rate for this area has made it up.
The practical position is that permitted development is the exception here rather than the default assumption. The whole area falls within the Dorset national landscape, which is designated land, and permitted development rights are narrower on designated land than the national baseline. Layer a conservation area or a listing on top and the sensible order of work reverses: establish which consents your specific address needs before you commission drawings, not after you have fallen for a set of them.
Freedom to do what you like with your own house is the weakest thing this town has to offer. Extensions get built, but they get built the long way round, and the line item that surprises people is not the builder, it is everyone who has to sign off the builder.