Yes.
We wanted to buy it the second we moved in, in 2002, but it's an incredibly opaque process and it seemed impossible to obtain the "rateable value" which is a figure that everything hinges on. Without that, you have no way of knowing what the true value should be. So it got put on a back burner ...
(The theory is very simple ... it's how much ground rent you would have paid to the end of the lease, plus a sweetener for losing the freehold plus a bung for all the single ladies in the village less your starsign squared. I think ...)
Fast forward 9 years ... as luck (?!) would have it, we had a knock on the door and it was our freeloaderholder. One of those "you couldn't make it up" moments. He was asking if we were interested in buying the freehold and DW (being in sales in a former life) acted very cool and said "maybe" ...
Anyway we had to pay his legal and surveyors costs which were just over £2K, plus the freehold. The figure for the freehold wasn't that far off what we would have been prepared to pay if we could have calculated it, so we didn't horse-trade.
The addendum to this is that about 2 years prior to that visit, we had a card popped into the letter box from a "freehold advisory service". We made enquiries and had a visit from the company, and their job was to negotiate freehold purchases. They didn't ask for a fee upfront, but made their money from whatever "saving" they negotiated between the initial freehold price, and whatever we finally ended up paying.
Unfortunately for this company, I am very distrusting, and they were never able to escape the fact that they approached us, rather than being picked out of the shows age 
) Yellow Pages. To this day I still believe they were in cahoots with the free-loader--holder and would have worked to drive the value up, rather than down ...
Your starting point is here :
www.lease-advice.org/
Be prepared for some heavy bureaucratic nightmares though. In out case it was the local council simply denying there was ever such a thing as "rateable value" (I still have the email) and trying to palm us off onto the water authority (who replied "You what ?"). The whole experience made it seem as if nobody in the UK had ever once tried to buy their own freehold. Which, given the professions involved (surveyors and solicitors) should come as no surprise.
Here's a phrase you will encounter: Marriage value 
.
If that hasn't put you off best of British, as my DM would have said.