There is something compelling about a place that exists because someone decided to make things there. Calvert owes its existence to Oxford Clay — the dense, carbon-rich deposit that sits beneath this stretch of Buckinghamshire and proved ideal for brickmaking. When Arthur Werner Itter opened the Calvert Brickworks in 1900, he did so because the Great Central Railway had already laid its main line past the village the year before, connecting raw material to market. At its peak the works employed nine hundred people and produced five and a half million bricks a week, feeding the growth of towns and cities across the south. The brickworks closed in 1991, and the clay pit that remained became the Calvert Jubilee nature reserve, managed by BBOWT. The village hall at Calvert Green now sits above the old kilns. That cycle — extraction, making, transformation, renewal — is written into the ground here, and it is about to happen again.
Award-winning Architects in Calvert
Why Gresford Architects for a Place in Transition
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. Calvert sits at a point of extraordinary change — HS2 and East West Rail converge here, and the area has been identified within the Cambridge–Milton Keynes–Oxford growth corridor for significant new housing. A place undergoing transformation on this scale needs architecture that is considered, not just delivered. We are ARB registered and RIBA Chartered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and our commitment to sustainable building has been recognised at national level — I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018, and our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award the same year. That combination of environmental rigour and design quality is precisely what Calvert needs as it grows.
Architecture Shaped by What Calvert Is Becoming
New Build Design is where the greatest opportunity lies in Calvert. With major development planned around the HS2 and East West Rail interchange, the homes built here in the coming years will define the character of this place for generations. That is a responsibility we take seriously. Every new home we design begins with the site itself — its orientation, its ground conditions, its relationship to what surrounds it — and works outward from there, creating buildings that belong to their setting rather than merely occupying it. For us, a new build is not a blank canvas but a conversation with the land, the climate and the people who will live in it.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in a place being built largely from scratch it carries particular weight. The decisions made now — materials, insulation standards, energy strategy, the relationship between buildings and landscape — will determine whether homes in Calvert are comfortable, economical to run and genuinely built for the era in which we live, or whether they simply repeat the mistakes of the last half-century. We design homes that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, and that means thinking about performance from the earliest sketch, not bolting it on at the end.
PassivHaus Design takes that ambition to its highest standard. A Passivhaus home virtually eliminates the need for conventional heating through exceptional insulation, airtight construction and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. I have lived in a Passivhaus myself, and the difference in comfort and air quality is something I describe from direct experience. For new homes in Calvert, where there is the freedom to build to this standard from the ground up, PassivHaus represents the most responsible choice an architect can make.
Extension Design matters for the existing homes in Calvert — the houses built on the former brickworks site and the older properties in the surrounding area. Many are well-built but modest in scale, and as families grow or needs change, a well-designed extension can transform how a home works without the disruption and cost of moving. Buckinghamshire Council assesses applications with care, and we welcome that discipline because working within clear parameters consistently produces better architecture.
EnerPHit offers a route for homes in Calvert that were built before thermal performance was a serious consideration. The EnerPHit retrofit standard — improved insulation, careful airtightness detailing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — brings an existing building to near-Passivhaus levels of comfort and efficiency. Renovations, too, have a place here: even in a relatively young village, buildings age and need thoughtful adaptation, and doing that work well means reading the structure honestly before reaching for a solution. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional homes in the open countryside beyond the settlement boundary, where the quality of the architecture itself must justify planning permission — a challenge that suits the way we work.
Calvert has always been a place where things are made. The Fletton bricks produced here in their millions supplied construction across the south of England throughout the twentieth century, and the next chapter is being written now. If you are planning a project here — a new home, an extension, or something more ambitious in the surrounding countryside — we would welcome the conversation.