There is a church in the Old Village — St John the Baptist, its coursed limestone walls dating from the late twelfth century, its broach spire rising above a settlement that was, for most of its history, a quiet rural parish. Walk a few minutes in any direction and you are in a different world entirely: the planned streets and open spaces of a post-war New Town, designed in the early 1950s by William Holford for a population that had swelled from a few hundred to nearly twenty thousand in barely two decades. That transformation — a village absorbed by the speed of industrial ambition — is what makes Corby fascinating to me as an architect. Stewarts and Lloyds drew thousands of workers south from Scotland to build and staff their steelworks from the 1930s onwards, and the town that grew around those furnaces has been growing ever since. The steelworks closed, but the momentum did not. With the West Corby development bringing some 4,500 new homes to the west of the town, Corby is once again building at scale — and the question it has always faced remains the same: how do you create genuine places, not just housing, when growth happens this quickly?
Award-winning Architects in Corby
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006, and we now work with clients nationwide from our Oxford studio. Sustainability sits at the core of everything we do — our two decades with the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register mean homes that are durable, economical to run, and designed to last through generations. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, and our Passivhaus-certified home The Deerings in Hertfordshire won the RIBA East Award that same year, demonstrating that energy performance and architectural ambition are the same conversation. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered. I have served as a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards, and our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, and The Modern House. My wife Phoebe, a conservation architect, has shaped how we engage with historic buildings — a sensitivity deepened through my membership of SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and reflected in how we approach the limestone fabric of Corby's Old Village alongside the demands of its expanding edges. That combination of forward-looking energy design and deep respect for what already stands is what a town growing as fast as Corby needs from its architects.
Architectural Services for a Town That Keeps Growing
New Build Design is where much of the opportunity in Corby lies. The West Corby Sustainable Urban Extension — 4,500 homes across 290 hectares of former agricultural land to the west of the town — represents one of the largest residential developments in North Northamptonshire, and it is not the only site changing the town's footprint. When growth happens at this scale, the risk is monotony: streets of identical houses that could be anywhere in England. We believe new homes should be comfortable to inhabit, economical to run, and rooted in the character of their surroundings rather than ignoring it. The ironstone that gave this region its industrial wealth also gave its older buildings their warmth and colour, and new architecture in Corby has an opportunity to draw on that material tradition rather than defaulting to the generic. North Northamptonshire Council manages planning for the town, and working with them from the earliest stages of a project means designs that move through the process with fewer delays and stronger outcomes.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through every project we take on, from material selection to the way a building performs across its lifetime. In a town where thousands of homes are being built in a single generation, the decisions made now about insulation, airtightness, orientation, and the carbon cost of materials will determine how those buildings feel and what they cost to run for the next fifty years and beyond. PassivHaus Design takes this further, achieving the highest certified standard of comfort and energy efficiency — homes that maintain stable temperatures year-round with minimal heating input. Our experience designing and living in Passivhaus homes gives us a practical understanding of what the standard demands and what it delivers. For anyone building a new home in or around Corby, the question is not whether to build sustainably but how far to take the ambition.
Extension Design for homes in Corby often means working with the housing stock that Holford's New Town plan and subsequent decades of expansion produced — houses built quickly and practically in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, many of which are well-constructed but undersized for the way families live now. A well-designed extension to a post-war home can transform not just the space but the relationship between inside and out, bringing light into rooms that were designed in an era of smaller windows and lower expectations. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a route to dramatically improving the thermal performance of these existing homes — reducing heat loss through walls, floors, and roofs while managing moisture carefully, so the building becomes more comfortable without the running costs that older construction typically demands. Renovations in the Old Village conservation area and around the handful of listed buildings that predate the steelworks era require a different conversation, one that balances the character of historic limestone and ironstone construction with the performance standards that modern life expects. Our restoration of the Grade II listed Great Barn in Buckinghamshire is the kind of project where those two priorities meet.
For those looking beyond the town's boundaries, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional new homes in the countryside — but it is a demanding standard that requires architecture of genuine quality to justify departure from normal planning restrictions. The rolling farmland around Corby, where the ironstone beds that built the steelworks lie close to the surface, rewards an architect who understands how buildings can belong to their landscape rather than simply sitting on it.
Corby has never stood still, and the next chapter of its growth deserves architecture that matches the ambition. Whether you are building a new home, extending an existing one, or bringing a historic building back to its best, we would welcome the conversation.