There is something telling about a place where a fourteenth-century church and a twenty-first-century housing estate sit within a few minutes' walk of each other. Cam has always been a settlement shaped by what lies beneath it and around it — the Jurassic limestone of the Cotswold escarpment, the River Cam threading through the valley floor, the cloth mills that once lined its banks. The Parish Church of St George, rebuilt by Lord Thomas Berkeley around 1340, still carries carved heads of Edward III and Jonathan Thoresby, Bishop of Worcester, in the angles of its tower, quiet witnesses to seven centuries of change. And change is very much what Cam is experiencing now, with the Millfields neighbourhood bringing hundreds of new homes to the southern edge of the parish. For an architect, this kind of duality is fascinating — a place where heritage and growth press up against each other, and the quality of what gets built next will shape how Cam feels for generations.
Award-winning Architects in Cam
Why Homeowners in Cam Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in 2006 with one conviction: that sustainable design is not a constraint but an opportunity — especially in places like Cam where growth happens all at once, and the quality of what gets built shapes a community for generations. We are now based in Oxford and work with clients across the country, bringing that same founding belief to every project regardless of location. We call it the marriage of the poetic and the practical. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — credentials that reflect a practice equally at home designing high-performance new builds and caring for historic structures. Our Passivhaus project The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine. In the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards.
How We Work With Homes in Cam
New Build Design is at the heart of what Cam needs right now. The Millfields development, with outline planning permission for 450 homes along with business space and a riverside park, represents one of the largest allocations in the Stroud District Local Plan, and it is not the only site. When this many homes are being built at once, the risk is that a place loses its identity — that new streets could belong anywhere. We believe the opposite is possible. A new home in Cam should respond to the escarpment that rises behind it, to the limestone that has defined building here for centuries, to the river valley that gives the parish its name. Stroud District Council, which handles planning applications for Cam, is rightly attentive to design quality in growth areas, and we welcome that scrutiny because it aligns with how we work: every new build we design begins with the site, the orientation, the materials and the community it will join.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through all of this. A home that works with its climate — using orientation, thermal mass and natural ventilation intelligently — is not only kinder to the planet but genuinely better to live in. At Millfields, where hundreds of homes are being built alongside a riverside park and new community spaces, there is a rare chance to establish a neighbourhood built for comfort from day one: homes that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, that will be affordable to run for decades, that belong architecturally to the Cam valley rather than just filling it. PassivHaus Design takes this further still, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating and maintain stable temperatures year-round. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings demonstrates what this standard looks like when it is designed with the same care for proportion, light and material as any traditional home.
Extension Design matters just as much in a settlement that is growing outward. Many of the existing homes in Cam — the post-war housing along the main roads, the older stone cottages in Upper Cam, the more recent estates that have filled the gaps between — were built for households and habits that have changed. An extension is often the most practical and sustainable response: adding the space a family needs without the upheaval of moving, and without consuming another piece of land. In Upper Cam, where older properties sit on generous plots with views towards the escarpment, an extension can open a home up to the landscape in ways the original builders never imagined. We design each one as a piece of architecture in its own right — considered in proportion, generous with daylight, and connected to the garden and the view beyond.
Renovations bring a different set of rewards. The older buildings in Cam — from the stone farmhouses that predate the Victorian expansion to the Grade I listed Church of St George itself, with its remarkable layering of fourteenth-century nave, later perpendicular south aisle added around 1360 by Thomas Horton, Abbot of Gloucester, and the Victorian chancel rebuilt in 1842 — demonstrate how buildings accumulate meaning over time. Renovating well means understanding what each phase contributed and working with it rather than against it. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings informs our approach to every historic project, and it is an approach that values honesty, sensitivity and a deep knowledge of how traditional materials behave. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a complementary path for older homes in Cam whose solid stone walls look warm but perform poorly: dramatically improving thermal comfort and reducing energy bills without altering the external character that gives these buildings their identity.
Beyond the village itself, the Cotswolds National Landscape rises to the east, and the open countryside between Cam and the escarpment presents its own architectural possibilities. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building exceptional new homes in rural locations where development would not normally be permitted — but only where the architecture is truly outstanding and demonstrates a genuine sensitivity to the landscape. It is a demanding standard, and rightly so. The homes that succeed under Paragraph 84 are those that could only exist in their particular place, designed from the ground up in response to topography, views, ecology and the building traditions of the area.
Cam is a place in the middle of a significant chapter — growing, changing, finding its next shape. Whether you are building a new home within one of the development sites, extending a family house that needs more room, renovating a stone cottage in Upper Cam, or imagining something exceptional on the escarpment, we would welcome the chance to talk it through.