Calne is a town that knows what it means to lose a building and find something new in the space left behind. For nearly two centuries, the Harris pork-curing factory stood at the heart of the town — at its peak employing around 2,000 people and processing 5,000 pigs a week, an industry so dominant that Calne was once described as the chief seat of bacon-curing in England. When the factory closed in 1982 and was demolished, the gap it left was not just physical but psychological. What followed was one of the more thoughtful pieces of small-town regeneration in the south-west: a collaboration between the district council, the county council, and English Heritage that turned former factory sites into housing and public space considered a model for how towns can rebuild without erasing what came before. That instinct — to work with what a place has been, rather than pretending it started yesterday — is at the centre of how I think about architecture.
Award-winning Architects in Calne
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. Calne is the kind of town where our range of experience is directly relevant — conservation work, energy retrofit, and the design of new homes all converging in a single place. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and I was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards for The Old Water Tower and named a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. I am ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered, a member of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — and accredited by The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust. Our work has appeared in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine. What unites all of it is a conviction that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — what I think of as the marriage of the poetic and the practical.
How We Work with Homes in Calne
Renovations in Calne mean engaging with a building stock shaped by centuries of local industry and the limestone that underlies the town. The conservation area contains buildings ranging from the medieval to the Victorian, many constructed in the local oolitic limestone that gives the older streets their character. St Mary's Church, Grade I listed with twelfth-century origins and a Norman arcade, is a building Pevsner described as the proud church of a prosperous clothiers' town — a reminder that Calne's wealth predates the Harris factory by several centuries. The regeneration of the former factory quarter in the 1990s and early 2000s, recognised by English Heritage as a model for small-town renewal, set a precedent for how alterations and new construction in the conservation area should respond to the existing grain. Working with Wiltshire Council's conservation team, we approach every renovation as an act of investigation first — understanding what lies within the walls, how the building has been altered over time, and where careful intervention can improve how it serves the people living in it without undermining the qualities that earned its place in the conservation area. Our membership of SPAB informs this work at every level: honest repair, respect for original fabric, and the confidence to act where doing so genuinely improves the building.
EnerPHit offers a certified retrofit pathway for older homes in Calne whose solid stone walls, single-glazed windows, and uninsulated roofs make them expensive to heat and uncomfortable in winter. The approach is whole-building: upgraded insulation appropriate to the wall construction — breathable systems for solid stone, different strategies for later brick — airtight detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a home that performs as well thermally as a new build while retaining the character and materials that make it worth keeping. For a town with over 300 listed buildings and structures across its neighbourhood area, EnerPHit is not a niche service but a practical necessity — the route by which Calne's older housing stock can remain viable for another century without the energy bills that currently make stone-walled homes so costly to run.
New Build Design matters in Calne because the town is growing. Wiltshire Council's Local Plan identifies significant housing growth for the Calne area up to 2036, and developments such as Penn Hill — delivering up to 205 homes along with orchards, allotments, and wildflower meadows — illustrate the kind of considered growth the town is pursuing. The Calne Community Neighbourhood Plan, which passed its referendum in February 2025 with 92.4% support, reinforces the expectation that new development should enhance rather than diminish the town's character. When we design new homes, we think about how they sit within the landscape and the settlement edge, how orientation and massing create comfortable, energy-efficient spaces from the outset, and how materials and proportions can acknowledge the limestone traditions of the older town without producing pastiche. Sustainable Design runs through every decision — from site analysis and passive solar design to material selection and long-term performance. It is not an add-on; it is the framework within which every other choice is made.
PassivHaus Design represents the most rigorous expression of that commitment: superinsulation, airtight construction, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, producing homes that need almost no conventional heating. For the new neighbourhoods arriving in Calne, this standard is entirely achievable, and we have the experience of building and living in Passivhaus homes ourselves. Extension Design across the town responds to the full range of housing Calne contains — from the stone-built properties within the conservation area to the twentieth-century estates that grew around Quemerford and the Abberd Brook valley. In the conservation area, any extension must demonstrate sensitivity to the established materials and proportions. Beyond those boundaries, the conversation broadens, but the principle holds: the best extensions complete a building rather than contradicting it.
Beyond the town, the open landscape of north Wiltshire — and the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, which rises to the east of the town — offers opportunities under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework. This provides a route for homes of truly exceptional architectural quality in rural locations, where the design itself justifies the site. The landscape around Calne, with its chalk downland, river valleys, and long views, demands architecture where environmental performance and sensitivity to the setting are inseparable.
Calne has already shown, in the way it rebuilt after losing the industry that defined it, that thoughtful design can turn disruption into something better. If you are considering a new home, an extension, a renovation, or a retrofit in or around the town, we would welcome the conversation. Understanding a place is where architecture begins, and Calne is a place with a great deal worth understanding.