Walk around St Peter's Church in Cassington and look up at the roofline. A corbel table of carved stone heads — faces weathered by nine centuries of Thames valley rain — circles the entire building, watching over the village as they have done since Geoffrey de Clinton founded the church around 1120. Inside, the chancel's stone groined vaulting survives from that same period, and fragments of early medieval consecration crosses survive at the west end of the nave. The broach spire was added in the early fourteenth century, and Bodley and Garner restored the building in the 1870s, but the bones of the Norman church remain. What strikes me about Cassington is that quality of quiet accumulation — a village of two greens, upper and lower, where rubble stone cottages and thatched roofs sit along winding lanes that were the only way in or out before the A40 Oxford bypass opened in 1934. Nineteen listed structures within the conservation area, and a landscape of open clay vale stretching to the floodplain of the Thames. It is a place where every generation has added something, and the best additions are the ones you barely notice.
Award-winning Architects in Cassington
Heritage-Sensitive Design Rooted in Experience
My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a way of thinking about old buildings that runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects — understanding how traditional construction works before you intervene, respecting the fabric rather than imposing on it. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has deepened that instinct into something more rigorous. We are ARB Registered and RIBA Chartered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited on The Green Register. I founded the practice in London in 2006, and we now work from the Eco Centre at Osney Mead in Oxford. Our project The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award, and our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, and The Modern House Journal. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and served as a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards.
Architectural Services for a Conservation Village
Cassington falls within West Oxfordshire District Council for planning purposes, and most of the parish lies within the Oxford Green Belt. The conservation area, designated in 1992, covers the historic core of both the upper and lower village. The Cassington Neighbourhood Plan, approved at referendum in June 2023 with 98% support, sets out the community's own vision for how the village should develop — or, in many cases, how it should be protected from the pressures of development happening all around it. With Saltcross Garden Village planned to the north of the A40 and continued expansion around Eynsham to the west, Cassington's Green Belt designation and conservation area status are more important than ever in defining what can and should be built here.
Renovations are at the heart of what many homeowners in Cassington need. The older properties — rubble stone terraces along the green, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cottages with their thatched or tiled roofs, the former Red Lion inn — are buildings that have been adapted many times over the centuries, and working with them requires an understanding of how stone, lime, and timber behave together. It means knowing where to be careful and where to be confident, reading the layers of alteration that each building carries. SPAB's approach to repair rather than replacement runs through our renovation work: mending what can be mended, using like-for-like materials, and making interventions that the building can absorb without losing its character.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a way to dramatically improve the thermal performance of these older homes without compromising their historic fabric. It is a demanding standard — exceptional airtightness, continuous insulation, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — but it is designed specifically for existing buildings, with the flexibility to accommodate the constraints that listed and traditional structures present. For homeowners in Cassington living with draughty stone walls and single-glazed windows, EnerPHit can transform comfort and running costs while preserving the character that makes the village what it is.
Extension Design in a conservation village like Cassington requires particular sensitivity. The winding lanes and small-scale plots mean that any addition is visible — there is nowhere to hide a clumsy extension. The challenge is to read the proportions, materials, and spatial rhythm of the existing building and the streetscape around it, then design something that feels like a natural continuation rather than an afterthought. In a Green Belt village, planning policy adds another layer of constraint, and we work closely with West Oxfordshire's planning team to ensure that proposals meet both Green Belt tests and conservation area expectations.
Sustainable Design is not a separate service at Gresford — it is the thread that connects everything we do. From the orientation and fabric of a new building to the careful upgrade of an existing one, we design homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. PassivHaus Design takes that commitment to its highest certified expression, delivering dramatically lower heating demand and exceptional indoor air quality. For New Build Design, whether on an infill plot within the village or as part of a wider scheme, we bring the same care for context, materials, and long-term performance that defines all our work.
The countryside around Cassington — the open clay vale, the floodplain meadows, the hedgerow-bounded fields — presents opportunities under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework for architecturally outstanding homes in the open countryside. It is a policy that demands genuine design excellence, a building that enhances its setting rather than merely occupying it, and it is a challenge we welcome for the right site and the right client.
Cassington has been shaped by people who built carefully, who added to what they found rather than replacing it, who understood that a village is something you tend over centuries. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the chance to talk about how good architecture can continue that tradition.