There is a moment, standing in the Market Place in Cirencester, when the stone seems to hold the entire history of the town in its surface. The great south porch of the Church of St John Baptist — built around 1490 with money from the wool merchants who made this place wealthy — rises in the same Jurassic limestone that lines the streets, that forms the mullioned windows of the Georgian townhouses, that has been quarried, carved and laid here for the better part of two thousand years. Corinium was the second-largest city in Roman Britain, and though the Roman walls are mostly gone, the material endures. That continuity is what strikes me most about Cirencester as an architect: the stone is not just a surface finish or a heritage constraint, it is the grammar of the place. Every building that works here, from every era, has found a way to speak it.
Award-winning Architects in Cirencester
An Architect's Practice Built on Heritage and Sustainability
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006, and the practice is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My particular passion has always been the intersection of sustainability and heritage — what I think of as the marriage of the poetic and the practical. In a town like Cirencester, where the Cotswolds National Landscape designation and multiple conservation areas shape every design decision, that dual focus is not a specialism but a necessity. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited with The Green Register. Our RIBA East Award-winning Passivhaus home The Deerings demonstrated that exceptional energy performance and architectural quality are not competing ambitions, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in the same year. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. More recently, I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025 — recognition that reflects almost twenty years of designing homes that are comfortable, built to last and as efficient as they can possibly be.
Extension, Renovation and Retrofit in Cirencester
Extension Design in Cirencester requires a sensitivity to context that goes well beyond matching the colour of the stone. Cotswold District Council manages planning for the town, and with multiple conservation areas covering the historic core — including the Town Centre, The Park, and Gloucester Street and River Walk — any extension needs to respond to the specific character of its immediate setting. The graded limestone slate roofs, the parapeted gables, the proportions of the stone mullioned windows: these are not details to be copied literally, but patterns to be understood and reinterpreted. A good extension in Cirencester finds the line between deference and identity, using the local palette — the warm honey and silver-grey tones of the oolitic limestone — without pretending to be something older than it is. That tension between honesty and respect is where the most interesting design work happens.
Renovations across Cirencester's four hundred or more listed buildings demand a deep understanding of how these structures were put together. The Church of St John Baptist, often called the Cathedral of the Cotswolds, is an extraordinary example of what Cotswold stone can achieve — its nave rebuilt between 1515 and 1530 in the Perpendicular Gothic style, every surface carved from the same limestone that underlies the town. The domestic buildings along Coxwell Street, Dollar Street and Park Street present their own challenges: thick rubble-stone walls with lime mortar, timber roof structures that have shifted over centuries, and a thermal performance that can be dramatically improved without compromising the character that makes them worth keeping. As a member of SPAB, I approach every renovation with the principle that understanding what is already there is the first and most important step. These buildings have survived because they were built with care. They deserve the same in return.
EnerPHit — the Passivhaus Institute's standard for retrofit — is particularly relevant for homes in Cirencester where solid stone walls, single-glazed windows and uninsulated roofs make heating bills far higher than they need to be. The EnerPHit approach works with the existing structure, carefully improving insulation, airtightness and ventilation to achieve measurably better comfort without the loss of character that heavy-handed interventions can cause. For a Cotswold stone townhouse, that might mean internal wall insulation detailed to avoid moisture problems in the lime-mortar construction, secondary glazing that preserves the external appearance of historic windows, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to manage indoor air quality. These are not cosmetic upgrades — they transform how a building feels to live in, season after season.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects, from the first sketch to the final detail. In Cirencester, that means thinking about how materials are sourced, how a building is oriented to make the most of natural light, and how the fabric performs over decades rather than just at the point of completion. New Build Design, where we are designing from first principles, gives us the opportunity to address all of these questions from the start — and PassivHaus Design takes that ambition to its fullest expression, creating homes that need almost no conventional heating. We have designed to this standard and lived in the results. Beyond the town itself, the Cotswolds National Landscape stretches across the surrounding countryside, and Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a pathway for an exceptional new home in a rural setting where the design demonstrates genuine quality and sensitivity to its landscape.
If you are considering a project in Cirencester — whether that involves finding the right way to extend within one of the conservation areas, understanding how to work with stone that has stood for centuries, or transforming energy performance without losing character — we would welcome the conversation.