Yes, and for most of the village it is an unremarkable job. The protected buildings here are real and countable, but the bulk of the housing stock went up after the war with nothing attached to it. Applications go in constantly. The constraint is never the village, it is the specific address. Buy the pretty one and you buy the audience that comes with it.
The listed-building register records 112 entries for the area: 106 at Grade Two, three at Grade Two star and three at Grade One. The council tax valuation list, for scale, holds 1,550 dwellings. Listing covers a building inside and out, which means consent is needed for work that would be nobody's business on an ordinary street, and the things that derail a project are rarely the extension itself. Windows, internal walls and chimneys have ended more schemes than rooflines ever have.
One conservation area covers Downton itself. Inside a conservation boundary the threshold for what needs permission drops, and alterations that would pass without comment on a post-war close become something the council wants to see first. The exact additional controls are set locally rather than assumed from the label, so finding out which side of the boundary an address sits on is a job for before the architect, not after.
Three scheduled monuments sit within the area. That is the strictest protection tier in the system and it applies to land far more often than to houses, but where a plot happens to sit near one, the first conversation is about archaeology rather than drawings.
The most useful evidence is what the neighbours have actually been doing. Across the window from April 2024 to July 2026, 900 planning applications were logged for this area, 360 of them in the most recent twelve months, with four withdrawn along the way. Whatever the constraints look like written down, this is not a village where people have given up filling in forms.
In practice the place divides in two. An unlisted house outside the conservation boundary works under the ordinary permitted development rules, where a modest rear extension is a discussion with a builder rather than a committee. A listed house, or one inside the boundary, or both, has those rights curtailed and needs consent before anything starts. About 27% of the dwellings on the valuation list predate 1930, which is the pool the constraints are drawn from, though age on its own is not the same as protection and plenty of old houses here carry none.
Freedom to alter a house in Downton sits somewhere in the middle: not a village preserved in aspic where every pane of glass is spoken for, and not one where you can do as you like either. Establish which category the address falls into before falling for the floor plan, because that single fact decides whether the project takes months or years.