On the morning of 15 March 1725, fire swept through Buckingham and consumed more than a third of the town — 138 houses out of 387, along with Castle Street, Castle Hill and the north side of Market Hill. What rose from the ashes was a new town in brick: the Georgian streetscape that defines Buckingham today. Walk through the centre now and you read the rebuilding in every facade — handmade brick from the heavy North Buckinghamshire clay, rubbed headers, sash windows, the quiet order of eighteenth-century proportion. But look more carefully and the survivors appear. The Chantry Chapel on Market Hill, built in the late twelfth century as part of St John's Hospital and reconstructed in the fifteenth century, the oldest building in the town. The Prebend End on Church Street with its extraordinary twisted brick chimney, Elizabethan and untouched by the flames. For an architect, Buckingham is a town whose Georgian confidence sits on medieval bones, and understanding which layer you are working with is where every good project begins.
Award-winning Architects in Buckingham
An Award-Winning Practice Built on Conservation and Sustainability
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our Oxford studio. A town like Buckingham — where the story of destruction and rebuilding is written into the fabric of every street — calls for an architect who reads buildings as carefully as they design them. I am an ARB registered, RIBA Chartered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited by The Green Register. That combination of heritage understanding and energy performance expertise is not common, but it is exactly what a town rebuilt after catastrophe demands. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. We have restored a Grade II listed barn in Buckinghamshire — The Great Barn — which required the same sensitivity to structure, material and history that the listed buildings in Buckingham deserve. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her expertise in historic buildings has shaped the way we approach every project where old and new must coexist.
Architecture Shaped by Buckingham's Character
Renovations in Buckingham mean working with buildings that carry two stories at once. The conservation area covers much of the historic centre — the curving streets that follow the loop of the River Great Ouse, from Castle Street through Market Hill and along the High Street, a medieval layout shaped by the river that the Georgian rebuilding preserved even as it replaced the buildings. A Georgian facade on Castle Street or Market Hill may be the 1720s rebuilding, but the plot it sits on, and sometimes the rear walls or cellars beneath, belong to the medieval town that burned. The brick is local — fired from North Buckinghamshire clay, with the warm red-brown tones and slight irregularity that distinguish handmade stock from anything industrial. Understanding how these buildings were constructed, how they breathe, and where moisture moves through solid masonry is essential before any alteration begins. We approach Renovations with the same forensic care we brought to The Great Barn: reading the building first, then designing with it rather than against it.
The Georgian houses that line Buckingham's centre are strong candidates for EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's rigorous framework for energy retrofit. These are solid-walled buildings — thick brick construction with no cavity — and conventional insulation approaches can cause real damage if the moisture dynamics are not understood. EnerPHit works with the physics of the building: carefully detailed insulation at the right junctions, improved airtightness where heat loss is greatest, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain air quality without losing warmth. The result is a home that costs far less to heat through a winter on the Great Ouse, stays comfortable in every season, and retains the period character that makes the conservation area worth protecting. Having lived in a Passivhaus home myself, I know the difference this makes — not as a technical abstraction but as daily experience.
Extension Design in Buckingham requires an architect who understands two distinct conditions. Within the conservation area, the tight medieval plot widths and the established brick-and-sash character of the post-fire streetscape set clear parameters — any extension must be sympathetic to the materials and proportions that the eighteenth-century builders established. On the residential streets beyond the historic core, where twentieth-century development has expanded the town, there is more freedom to create generous, light-filled additions that open homes to their gardens and bring contemporary spatial quality to houses that were not designed with it. In both cases, the best extensions do not announce themselves — they make the whole house work better.
Sustainable Design in Buckingham draws on what the town's rebuilders understood instinctively. After the fire, they built with local clay fired into brick, oriented their facades to the street and the light, and constructed walls thick enough to last three centuries. When we design sustainably, we continue that logic with the precision of modern building science: homes that capture passive solar gain, minimise energy loss, and use materials chosen for their whole-life performance. This is what the 1725 rebuilding understood instinctively — that economy and longevity are the same thing. A home designed this way costs less to heat through a Great Ouse winter, performs more reliably, and ages better than anything built in haste.
PassivHaus Design takes the thermal discipline of Buckingham's best surviving buildings and sharpens it to a standard the Georgian builders could not have imagined. The rebuilt town after the 1725 fire proves it: thick brick walls, careful proportions, buildings that have stood three centuries without mechanical help. A Passivhaus home in Buckingham does the same work through meticulous insulation, airtight construction and heat recovery — performing as reliably as the fabric that surrounds it, but with precision the eighteenth century could not achieve.
New Build Design in Buckingham means responding to a town that has already proved it can reinvent itself without losing its identity. Any new home here must earn its place through quality of materials and clarity of design, whether within the conservation area or on the edges of the town where growth continues. For sites in the open countryside north of the Great Ouse, where North Buckinghamshire clay gives way to gentler farmland, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes — buildings that bring the same care for materials and proportion that the post-fire rebuilders brought to the town centre, extended to new construction in the open landscape.
Buckingham is a town that rebuilt itself from fire and emerged stronger, more ordered, more beautiful. Whether you are renovating one of the Georgian houses that rose from the ashes, improving the energy performance of a solid-walled home, extending to create the space your family needs, or building something entirely new, we bring the same conviction to every project: architecture should be comfortable, designed to last, and as efficient as it is honest about the place it belongs to.