In 1849, workmen restoring St Lawrence's Church in Broughton stripped back layers of plaster and found something remarkable beneath — a cycle of medieval wall paintings, hidden for three hundred years, depicting St George, a doom scene and a Pietà. The paintings had been there all along, waiting under the surface. That image stays with me when I think about Broughton, because this is a village where the deeper you look, the more you find. A fourteenth-century church and a moated manor site sit within a quiet conservation area bounded by the brook that gave the village its Old English name — brook farm — while just beyond, one of England's fastest-growing cities continues to build outward. Broughton holds both of these realities at once, and that tension between what has accumulated over centuries and what is arriving now is what makes it such a compelling place to work as an architect.
Award-winning Architects in Broughton
An Award-winning Practice Working Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients nationwide. We are RIBA Chartered and ARB registered, members of the Passivhaus Trust, SPAB and The Green Register — a combination that reflects our belief that great architecture must be sustainable, sensitive to place and technically rigorous in equal measure. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards, and that experience reinforced something I have always felt: the best residential architecture does not choose between ambition and restraint. It finds the place where both meet. In Broughton, where a medieval village and a modern city edge share the same postcode, that balance is not abstract — it is the daily reality of how people live.
Architecture for a Village Between Two Worlds
The expansion of Milton Keynes eastward has brought significant new housing to the areas around Broughton, from the Brooklands development to the emerging Eastern Strategic City Extension. For anyone commissioning a New Build Design in this context, the opportunity is considerable — and so is the responsibility. New homes here do not need to mimic the brick-and-tile vernacular of the old village, but they do need to be designed with the same care for how a building meets the ground, addresses its neighbours and works with light and landscape. We approach every new build as a chance to create something that is comfortable, designed to last and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. Sustainable Design is not an add-on for us; it is the starting point, the conviction that a building which treads lightly on its environment is also a better, more joyful place to live.
PassivHaus Design takes that conviction to its most rigorous conclusion — continuous insulation, airtight construction and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, delivering homes that use a fraction of the energy a standard new build requires. For the scale of development happening around Broughton, the case for PassivHaus is clear: homes that cost far less to run, that stay comfortable in every season and that reduce carbon emissions at a time when we cannot afford not to. We have lived in a Passivhaus home ourselves and know firsthand the difference it makes — not just to energy bills, but to the quality of daily life.
Within the Broughton conservation area, the character is entirely different. The old village core around St Lawrence's Church, the moated manor site and the brook retains a scale and quietness that seven centuries of habitation have shaped. Renovations to buildings here — whether the older brick cottages or later additions — require an understanding of how these structures were built and how they have changed over time. My SPAB membership has been formative in this regard, teaching me to read a building before reaching for a solution. EnerPHit, the certified retrofit standard developed from Passivhaus principles, allows us to dramatically improve the thermal performance of older homes without compromising the character that the conservation area designation exists to protect.
Extension Design in Broughton serves both contexts. For homes within the conservation area, Milton Keynes City Council will expect any extension to respect the existing building's proportions, materials and relationship to the street. For properties in the newer areas, extensions offer the chance to rethink how a home connects to its garden and the wider landscape — to bring in light, open up views and create spaces that work for how a family actually lives. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a separate route for those seeking to build an exceptional home in the open countryside around Broughton, where the quality of the architecture itself is the justification for planning permission.
Broughton has been accumulating layers for a long time — from the Domesday survey to the medieval moats to the wall paintings that waited centuries to be seen again. Whatever you are planning here, whether it sits within the conservation area or on the expanding eastern edge, we would be glad to talk about how we can help you build something worthy of the next layer.