Most towns grow outwards from a church or a market, filling in the gaps as need and money allow. Cricklade was designed. In 878 or 879, as part of the chain of fortified burhs that defended Wessex against the Danes, someone laid out a square grid of streets within earthen ramparts at the point where the Roman Ermin Way crossed the Thames. Over a thousand years later, the grid is still there. The High Street still follows the axis those Saxon planners set, and the line of the ramparts can still be traced on all four sides of the town. What strikes me about Cricklade is how that original discipline — a layout drawn for defence — became the framework for something far richer: a town of over a hundred listed buildings, a Grade I church with a crossing tower begun in the early sixteenth century and completed in 1553 at the expense of the Duke of Northumberland and the Hungerford family of Down Ampney, and a Court Leet that still meets to manage North Meadow in the way it has done since Saxon times. Structure, it turns out, is not the enemy of character. It is the condition for it.
Award-winning Architects in Cricklade
Trusted Across the Country, Grounded in Conservation
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am ARB-registered, RIBA Chartered, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — a commitment to understanding historic fabric that matters profoundly in a town like Cricklade, where the conservation area encompasses buildings spanning nearly every century since the Norman Conquest. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire that proved sustainable architecture can be comfortable, beautiful and joyful to live in. Our restoration of The Great Barn, a Grade II listed barn in Buckinghamshire, reflects the same care for materials and detail that work in Cricklade demands. I am accredited by The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust, was shortlisted for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, and was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025.
Designing Within the Saxon Grid
Renovations are at the core of what Cricklade needs from an architect. With over a hundred listed buildings concentrated along the High Street and the streets that branch from it, the town carries an extraordinary density of historic fabric for its size. The materials here are distinctive — Corallian ragstone, quarried in the surrounding area and quite different in texture and colour from the oolitic limestone of the Cotswolds to the north, gives Cricklade's older buildings their particular character. Working with these walls means understanding their construction: rubble stone, lime mortar, breathable renders. My SPAB membership reflects a commitment to honest repair — working with the building's existing materials rather than against them, allowing the fabric to breathe, and intervening only where the structure's long-term future requires it. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, expects any work within the conservation area to preserve or enhance this character, and that is a standard we share.
Sustainable Design is woven into every project we take on, but in Cricklade it carries a particular resonance. This is a town whose most treasured asset — North Meadow, a National Nature Reserve holding around eighty per cent of Britain's wild snakeshead fritillaries — has survived precisely because of sustainable management. The Court Leet's stewardship of that common land across centuries is a lesson in thinking long-term, and it is the same principle that guides our approach to buildings: design that reduces energy demand, uses materials responsibly, and creates homes that will perform well not just today but for decades to come. PassivHaus Design takes that fabric-first philosophy to its most rigorous standard, and at The Deerings we demonstrated that a certified Passivhaus home can maintain stable temperatures year-round with almost no active heating.
New Build Design matters in Cricklade because the town is growing. Proposals for up to 315 homes on land north of Common Hill are under discussion, and the Cricklade Neighbourhood Plan is being reviewed to extend its scope to 2038. New homes here need to respond to the existing townscape — the scale of the High Street, the ragstone palette, the relationship between buildings and the floodplain — while meeting contemporary standards of energy performance and comfort. This is where our experience in both heritage contexts and Passivhaus principles comes together: designing homes that belong to Cricklade's next chapter without pretending to be part of its past.
Extension Design in a conservation area requires the same material awareness. The best extensions in Cricklade will take their proportions from the host building and respect the ragstone-and-render vocabulary of the streetscape, while introducing better thermal performance, natural light and more usable space. EnerPHit offers a rigorous retrofit path for the older solid-walled homes in Cricklade where conventional insulation approaches are not an option — carefully modelled improvements to airtightness and thermal performance that can reduce energy bills dramatically while respecting the building's character. Beyond the town, where the Thames floodplain gives way to open Wiltshire countryside, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides the route for architecturally exceptional homes in rural settings, where design quality and landscape sensitivity are planning requirements rather than optional extras.
Cricklade's Saxon planners gave this town a framework that has lasted over a thousand years. The buildings that come next — whether a careful renovation on the High Street, a new home at the edge of the floodplain, or an extension that brings an older house into the twenty-first century — deserve the same long view. If you are considering a project in Cricklade, we would welcome the conversation.