Yes, and most of your neighbours have already had a go. Five listed buildings across the whole area, every one of them at the lowest grade. One conservation area. Hundreds of planning applications lodged over the past couple of years, so this is plainly a place where people build sideways rather than move. The thing most likely to complicate your extension is not a heritage officer. It is what is underneath the garden.
Historic England's register carries five listed buildings in the area, all grade two, with none at grade one and none at grade two star. That is a light heritage footprint for somewhere with a church and a documented past. Listing at any grade means consent is needed for works affecting the building's character, inside as well as out, and that includes things owners assume are cosmetic: windows, internal walls, roof coverings. It also means the five owners concerned already know exactly what they took on, and the several thousand other households here are not affected at all.
There is one conservation area, covering West Parley itself. Inside a conservation area the ordinary permitted development rights are trimmed rather than removed. Demolition needs consent, trees get protection, and the council takes a firmer line on frontages, roof alterations and anything visible from the street. The brief carries no Article 4 direction for the area, so the additional restrictions that some councils layer on top are not recorded here. Whether a specific house sits inside or outside the boundary is a question worth settling before an architect starts drawing, because the answer changes what is possible rather than merely what is expensive.
Five scheduled monuments sit within the area, the strictest protection tier there is. Scheduling protects the monument and the ground around it rather than any nearby house, so for almost every buyer this is background rather than obstacle. It matters if your plot happens to sit against one, in which case works affecting the setting become a separate and slower conversation.
The live evidence is the most useful thing on this page. Across the window from April 2024 to July 2026, the planning register carries 955 applications for the area, with 412 of those lodged in the past twelve months. That is a great deal of activity for a village of this size, and it tells you what the housing stock already implies: single-storey homes on generous plots invite loft conversions, rear extensions and garage conversions, and people here act on the invitation. What those applications were decided as is not something this data answers, so treat the volume as evidence of appetite rather than of approval.
The ground is the real constraint. The British Geological Survey puts the maximum shrink-swell hazard here at class three, with about 54% of the area reaching that class or above. Shrink-swell describes clay that expands when wet and contracts when dry, which moves foundations over seasons rather than years. In practice it means deeper foundations than a standard detail, care about where mature trees sit relative to the new footings, and a structural engineer's opinion built into the budget from the start rather than discovered by a building inspector halfway through. It is a design cost, not a reason to abandon the project, and half the village has already dealt with it.
Freedom to alter a home here is middling. The heritage constraints are genuinely light and touch very few houses, the planning register shows plenty of people getting on with it, and the friction that does exist sits in the soil report and the conservation area boundary rather than in a listed-building consent nobody warned you about.