There is no conservation area at St Mary's Bay and none anywhere in the parish, in a district that has twenty one of them. There are no listed buildings within three quarters of a mile of the village, and the nearest is a mile off, in Dymchurch. The whole parish carries only eight entries on the National Heritage List and not one of them is in the Bay.
Dymchurch, two miles up the road, has twenty listed buildings within the same radius of its centre, including three Martello Towers and two Grade II star buildings. Two villages on the same stretch of road, and completely different paperwork.
For an unlisted house here that means the ordinary permitted development rules apply rather than the conservation area version. It is not a blank cheque. Permitted development does not apply to flats at all, roof enlargements carry their own volume and elevation limits whatever the designation, and planning conditions routinely remove permitted development on estates built since the mid seventies, which is a lot of this village. Folkestone and Hythe District Council is the one to ask, and it is worth asking before materials are ordered rather than after.
The stock is overwhelmingly twentieth century, and the parish's own neighbourhood plan describes the village as mainly C20 homes with a village centre in Jefferstone Lane. It grew from a War Department camp built along Jefferstone Lane in the First World War. The author Edith Nesbit converted two former Royal Flying Corps sheds into bungalows called Longboat and Jollyboat at the bottom of what is now Nesbit Road, and by 1975 the bungalows along Laurel Avenue had started what everyone calls the Tree Estate.
On the 2011 census the parish ran to about forty four per cent detached houses and bungalows and forty seven per cent semi detached, against under five per cent each of terraces and flats. The district figures are far more even. Nine homes in ten here are detached or semi detached, which in practice means we are usually quoting a whole roof for one household rather than negotiating access across a terrace.
