Berinsfield is one of the most unusual villages in Oxfordshire — not because of what it inherited but because of what it chose to build. In 1949, Bullingdon Rural District Council commissioned the architect and town planner Sir William Holford to design a new village from scratch on the site of RAF Mount Farm, the wartime reconnaissance base just north of Dorchester-on-Thames. Holford envisioned a modest community with garden village principles at its heart — radial roads, green spaces woven through the housing, a settlement shaped by intention rather than accident. What was actually built through the early 1960s expanded well beyond that original vision, and the result is a village whose relationship with its own design has been complicated ever since. That tension between ambition and execution is something I think about constantly. Berinsfield is now entering a genuinely exciting new chapter, with Garden Village status awarded in 2019 and plans for around 1,700 new homes on the former airfield land to the east. Good architecture has the chance to fulfil the promise that was made over sixty years ago.
Award-winning Architects in Berinsfield
Why Gresford Architects for Berinsfield
Gresford Architects is Oxford-based, well positioned to work in South Oxfordshire and familiar with the planning context that shapes communities like Berinsfield. I founded the practice in London in 2006 around a conviction that sustainability is not a constraint on good design — it is the engine of it. I am RIBA Chartered, ARB Registered, and a member of the Passivhaus Trust, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and The Green Register. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the year I was also a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our work has appeared in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. That range of experience in new build and retrofit is exactly what a village with Berinsfield's trajectory needs.
Architecture for a Village Being Remade
Berinsfield falls under South Oxfordshire District Council for planning, and the village's future is shaped by Policy STRAT10i in the adopted Local Plan, which allocates the former airfield land for a comprehensive Garden Village development. The council has committed over £550,000 to the Berinsfield Delivery Plan, funding community infrastructure, sustainability and active travel improvements. For a village that has faced higher-than-average deprivation and an ageing building stock, this is a moment of genuine renewal.
New Build Design is where the greatest opportunity lies. The 1,700-home Garden Village allocation on the former airfield east of Berinsfield gives architects the rare chance to design homes from first principles on land that has sat undeveloped since the RAF left. Orientation for solar gain, fabric-first construction, layouts shaped around how families actually live — these decisions determine comfort, running costs and environmental impact for decades. PassivHaus Design takes that fabric-first approach to its highest certified standard, and for a development of this scale, setting that benchmark from the outset makes both environmental and economic sense.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and for a community that was conceived as a planned settlement — Holford's garden village idea, however imperfectly realised — it carries particular resonance. We design buildings that are comfortable, built to last, and that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. For the existing homes in Berinsfield — many built during the rapid 1960s expansion that grew the village far beyond Holford's original 278-unit plan — Extension Design can open up the compact layouts of that era, bringing in natural light and creating flexible spaces while respecting the street patterns and green spaces that remain from Holford's original design.
Renovations across Berinsfield's existing housing stock address one of the village's most pressing challenges. Many of these homes have deteriorated, and energy performance sits well below modern standards. EnerPHit provides a certified retrofit pathway — improved insulation, airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — bringing 1960s construction closer to new-build performance and cutting heating costs in a village where deprivation has been higher than the district average. For sites in the open countryside south of the village towards the Thames, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional rural architecture that justifies its place in the landscape.
Holford's original vision for Berinsfield was of a village where architecture served community. That vision is being renewed, and it deserves the same seriousness of intent. If you are planning a project in Berinsfield, whether a new home or improvements to an existing one, we would welcome the conversation.