There is something quietly remarkable about a place that still quarries its own building stone. Barnhill Quarry sits within the Broadwell plantation, ten hectares of working ground where Pennant sandstone has been cut for centuries — the same grey-blue carboniferous stone that built the older cottages along the Forest edge and paved streets far beyond Gloucestershire. Coalway takes its name from an ancient route recorded in 1345, a path that carried charcoal north-westwards from the Forest boundary down Lord's Hill toward Coleford. Walk through these two villages today and you read their geology in their walls: the hard, fine-grained sandstone of the Forest of Dean, darker and more muscular than the oolitic limestone of the Cotswolds to the east, shaped by an industrial past that gave these settlements their character. As an architect, that relationship between what is underfoot and what gets built above ground is endlessly interesting to me — it is the kind of connection that good design should honour rather than ignore.
Award-winning Architects in Broadwell / Coalway
Trusted Architects Working Across the Forest of Dean
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow and qualified in 2002, and over almost twenty years of practice I have become convinced that the most rewarding buildings are those that take their setting seriously — not as a constraint to be navigated but as a starting point for design that genuinely belongs. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited with The Green Register. Our project The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a Passivhaus home, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. We have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine — recognition that reflects what we care about most: buildings that are comfortable, designed to last, and that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible.
Architectural Services for Homes in Broadwell and Coalway
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through all of our work, but it takes on a particular directness in a place shaped by extraction. Broadwell and Coalway grew because of what lay beneath them — coal, iron ore, sandstone — and the question for the next generation of buildings here is how to give back to a landscape that has given so much. We approach Sustainable Design as a whole-building discipline: orientation and massing to capture daylight and manage solar gain, material specification that prioritises low-embodied-energy choices, ventilation strategies that maintain air quality without relying on energy-hungry mechanical systems. In a village where Pennant sandstone is still quarried within walking distance, there is a genuine opportunity to build with materials that have travelled almost no distance at all — reducing transport emissions while using a stone whose thermal mass and durability have been proven over five hundred years of local use. Every decision is shaped by the conviction that sustainability is not a constraint but a force to create homes that are more comfortable, more economical to run and more joyful to live in.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is particularly relevant to the housing stock in Broadwell and Coalway. West Dean Rural District Council built forty-four homes east of the Five Acres road between 1923 and 1934, and followed them in 1948 with prefabricated bungalows, most of which were later replaced. Houses from this period — solid-walled, single-glazed, often with minimal insulation — are among the least energy-efficient in the country, and their occupants pay the price every winter. An EnerPHit retrofit works through these buildings methodically: high-performance insulation suited to the specific wall construction, new windows engineered for airtightness and thermal performance, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain fresh air without losing heat. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House and The Spaces, demonstrated that this standard delivers measurably lower energy bills, genuine comfort, and a building that works better in every way. For homes in Broadwell and Coalway built in the inter-war and post-war decades, EnerPHit offers a path from draughty to comfortable without demolishing what is already there.
New Build Design for sites in and around these villages should respond to the Forest of Dean's distinctive material palette rather than importing a suburban language from elsewhere. The Pennant sandstone quarried at Barnhill — grey-blue with occasional warm brown tones, fine-grained and exceptionally hard-wearing — is not the honey-coloured ashlar of the Cotswolds but something altogether more robust, a stone that reflects the industrial geology of the Forest basin. Planning applications here go through Forest of Dean District Council, and new development near the Forest edge is expected to demonstrate sensitivity to the landscape's character. We design new homes around the same principles that guide all our work — airtightness, insulation, solar orientation, connection to the landscape — but shaped by the specifics of this place: the stone, the topography, the relationship between settlement and ancient woodland that defines the western Forest of Dean.
Extension Design in Broadwell and Coalway often means working with the mixed housing stock that reflects the villages' layered history — from older Forest-edge cottages in local sandstone to the twentieth-century council housing and later private development that filled the gaps between them. A well-designed extension reads the existing building carefully, responds to its proportions and materials, and improves how the home works for the people who live in it: more light, better connections between rooms, a proper relationship with the garden. Renovations call for the same attentiveness to what is already there, whether that means repointing sandstone walls with an appropriate lime mortar or opening up a cramped post-war layout to create the kind of flowing, light-filled spaces that make a real difference to daily life. The Church of the Good Shepherd, designed by William Leah and built in 1938 as a permanent replacement for the original 1891 iron mission church, is a Grade II listed reminder that even modest buildings in these villages carry real architectural value worth understanding and respecting.
PassivHaus Design takes the principles of Sustainable Design to their most exacting standard, engineering homes around airtightness, insulation and solar orientation so precisely that they need almost no conventional heating — even through a Forest of Dean winter, where the wooded valleys can hold damp cold well into spring. For those with sites in the open countryside beyond the village boundaries, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to genuinely exceptional new architecture, provided the design demonstrates that it enhances rather than diminishes the landscape it sits within. The Forest of Dean is a place where geology, industry and settlement have been intertwined for centuries, and a Paragraph 84 proposal here must show that it understands and contributes to that ongoing story.
Broadwell and Coalway are places where what lies beneath the ground has always shaped what gets built above it. Whether you are planning a new home, extending an existing one, or making an older building work harder for less energy, we would welcome the chance to talk it through.