There is something quietly remarkable about a village where you can stand in a churchyard and trace a thousand years of building in a single glance. At St Mary's in Cholsey, Saxon masonry survives in the tower — stonework laid before the Norman Conquest, still standing, still doing its job. The nave and chancel were rebuilt in the twelfth century, the tower heightened in the thirteenth and rebuilt above roof level in the late fourteenth, and over the centuries the church has been added to, repaired and adapted without losing its essential character. As an architect, I find that kind of continuity deeply instructive. It tells you that the best buildings are not fixed objects but living things, shaped by the care and ambition of every generation that inherits them.
Award-winning Architects in Cholsey
Why Homeowners in Cholsey Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and later moved the practice to Oxford, where we work from the Eco Centre in Osney Mead. In a village like Cholsey, where the building stock spans Saxon stonework through to Edwardian villas and everything between, the dual disciplines of heritage sensitivity and performance design become inseparable. I am RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register — qualifications that, taken together, mean we can move confidently between a listed cottage needing careful repair and a new home pushing the boundaries of energy performance.
The Deerings, our certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 and a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. Working with churches, farmhouses and cottages across Oxfordshire has taught me that the best architecture understands what a building already is before asking what it could become — a principle that feels especially alive in Cholsey, where every lane offers another century of building to learn from.
Architecture Shaped by Cholsey's Character
Cholsey sits within the planning authority of South Oxfordshire District Council and has a conservation area protecting the historic core around the church and village centre. The village also adopted a reviewed Neighbourhood Plan in 2022, setting clear expectations for how new development relates to the existing settlement. That planning framework, together with the presence of listed buildings and the conservation area designation, means that any architectural project here — whether it involves an older property or a new one — benefits from an informed understanding of the local context and the regulatory landscape.
Renovations are where the conversation often starts in a village like Cholsey. The older properties around the church and along the lanes leading to the Forty — the village green, whose name derives from the Old English for marshy isle — carry centuries of adaptation in their walls. Some reflect the chalk and flint traditions of the wider South Oxfordshire landscape, while brick became increasingly common as the village grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My SPAB training teaches a principle that matters enormously in this kind of setting: that a building's history is written in its fabric, and any intervention should add to that story rather than erase it. The aim is always to leave the building better — more comfortable, more efficient, more joyful to live in — without losing what makes it worth caring about.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is particularly suited to the older housing stock in Cholsey — the solid-walled cottages, the Victorian brick terraces along the lanes — where conventional cavity wall insulation is simply not an option. Rather than piecemeal improvements, EnerPHit coordinates insulation, airtightness, ventilation and window upgrades into a single, rigorous system, delivering dramatic improvements in comfort and energy costs without compromising the texture, colour and material character that gives these homes their identity.
Extension Design is one of the most common needs for homeowners in Cholsey. The Reading Road properties — Victorian and Edwardian brick and stone — and the cottages around the church were built to modest room sizes and tight floor plans that no longer match how families live. An extension here is not simply adding square metres; it is a conversation with the village's own building tradition. The materials matter: the tone of the brick, the proportion of the windows, the relationship to the lane or green. In a conservation area, a careless extension can damage that continuity; a thoughtful one can deepen it.
Sustainable Design underpins every project we take on, and New Build Design in Cholsey carries particular responsibility. The Neighbourhood Plan sets expectations for how new homes relate to the existing settlement — colour, material, scale — and those expectations deserve to be taken seriously. New homes here should be conceived as part of the village's material conversation: if they use brick, it should earn its place in the context of the Reading Road terraces and the older cottages. PassivHaus Design takes that ambition further still. The thermal comfort, airtightness and indoor air quality it delivers are exceptional — and in a village where new homes will be understood in relation to centuries-old stone buildings, that performance also makes a statement about how Cholsey cares for its future.
The countryside surrounding Cholsey — the Thames flood meadows to the east, the chalk downland rising to the south towards the Ridgeway — also presents opportunities under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework. This policy allows for truly outstanding or innovative homes in the open countryside where the architecture demonstrably enhances its setting, a rare and exhilarating challenge for any architect working in a landscape this layered and this loved.
If you are considering a renovation, extension or new build in Cholsey, or exploring the possibility of a Paragraph 84 home in the surrounding countryside, I would welcome the chance to talk. This is a village where the relationship between past and present is written into every wall, and that is exactly the kind of setting where careful, ambitious architecture can make the greatest difference.