There is something compelling about a place where nine hundred years of building sit alongside the newest streets in the borough. Bishop's Cleeve lies at the foot of the Cotswold escarpment, with Cleeve Hill — the highest point of the Cotswolds at over a thousand feet — rising to the south, and the broad lowlands of the Severn Vale stretching north. The village's ancient heart is still legible in the conservation area around St Michael and All Angels, where the twelfth-century Norman west front carries some of the most exuberant carved decoration in the county, and the south doorway's stone dragons with their intertwined tails have watched over the churchyard for the better part of a millennium. Yet much of what surrounds that core is twentieth and twenty-first century housing — estates, cul-de-sacs, new developments still taking shape. That duality is what interests me most as an architect: a place that is growing fast but has not lost the thread of what it was.
Award-winning Architects in Bishop's Cleeve
A Practice Shaped by Heritage and Performance
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and the practice is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Architecture, for me, has always been about the marriage of the poetic and the practical — designing homes that are comfortable, built to last and as efficient as they can possibly be. That conviction runs through nearly twenty years of work. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire that proved exceptional energy performance and architectural quality can go hand in hand. I was shortlisted for the RIBA South Award for The Old Water Tower and named a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. More recently, I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited with The Green Register. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal — work that reflects the same care for context, craft and sustainability that we bring to every commission, whether it involves a Grade I listed church neighbour or a house built last decade.
Architectural Services for a Village Between Escarpment and Vale
Extension Design is the service we are asked about most often in places like Bishop's Cleeve, and the reason is straightforward: the housing stock here spans centuries, and almost every era has left homes that could work harder for the families who live in them now. In the older parts of the village — along Church Road and Station Road, within sight of the fifteenth-century Tithe Barn that now serves as the village hall — an extension needs to respond to the materials and proportions of the conservation area. Tewkesbury Borough Council manages planning for Bishop's Cleeve, and the conservation area's character is defined by that T-shaped cluster of stone and timber-framed buildings around the church, several dating from before the fire of 1445 that destroyed much of the medieval village. Beyond the conservation area, the challenge is different but no less interesting: many of the post-war and modern homes in Bishop's Cleeve were built to standard patterns, and a well-designed extension can give them a character and spatial quality they were never intended to have.
EnerPHit — the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard — speaks directly to the housing stock that makes up so much of Bishop's Cleeve today. The estates that expanded Bishop's Cleeve from the 1950s onwards were built to standard patterns — cavity walls, single-glazed windows, next to no insulation — and their energy performance is often far worse than owners realise. The EnerPHit approach takes a whole-house view: improving insulation, airtightness and ventilation in a co-ordinated way that transforms comfort and dramatically reduces energy bills. For homes in Bishop's Cleeve built from the 1950s through to the 1990s, this is not a luxury — it is a practical investment. We have designed to the Passivhaus standard and lived in the results, so we understand the difference this level of performance makes in daily life, not just on paper.
New Build Design is particularly relevant in Bishop's Cleeve, where growth has been a defining feature of the last two decades and shows no sign of slowing. Major developments — including over two hundred homes approved on Stoke Road and a further hundred planned at North Clevelands — are reshaping the village's edges. When we design a new home from first principles, every decision about orientation, fabric, material and form is an opportunity to create something that performs well and belongs in its setting. At the foot of the Cotswold escarpment, that setting matters: the scale of the landscape, the way the land falls from the hills to the vale, the relationship between the rooflines and the skyline beyond. Sustainable Design is woven through this process, from the first sketch to the final detail — how materials are sourced, how the building is oriented to capture natural light, how the fabric will perform not just at completion but for decades to come. PassivHaus Design takes that ambition to its fullest expression, creating homes that need almost no conventional heating. We have built to this standard, and the difference between a Passivhaus home and a standard new build is not subtle — it is a fundamentally different experience of comfort, quiet and air quality.
Renovations in the conservation area around St Michael and All Angels require a particular understanding of how historic buildings work. Cleeve Hall, the former residence of the Bishop of Worcester dating from around 1250, and the cluster of listed buildings around Church Road represent some of the oldest domestic architecture in the parish — stone, timber-frame and rendered walls that have been altered, extended and patched over centuries. Every stone and timber-framed building in Bishop's Cleeve has survived centuries by adapting in small, careful increments — some through the fire of 1445, others through the quiet accumulation of Georgian and Victorian alterations. As a member of SPAB, my approach is always to understand what is there before deciding what to change, to restore rather than replace. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a pathway for an exceptional new home in the open countryside beyond the village, where the Cotswolds National Landscape and the escarpment create a setting that demands architecture of genuine quality and sensitivity. The bar is deliberately high, and rightly so.
Whether you are extending a family home on one of the newer estates, improving the energy performance of a house that has never been as comfortable as it should be, or navigating the sensitivities of the conservation area, we would welcome the conversation. Bishop's Cleeve is a place with real architectural range — and that is exactly the kind of challenge we enjoy.