The railway made Didcot. Before Brunel chose this stretch of flat Oxfordshire farmland as the junction where his Great Western Main Line would meet the branch to Oxford, there was barely a village here — a twelfth-century church, a scattering of cottages, and a population that would not have filled a single carriage. What followed was one of the most complete transformations any English settlement has undergone, and what interests me as an architect is that it is happening again. Didcot is one of the fastest-growing towns in the south of England, designated as a Garden Town with plans for over fifteen thousand new homes, and the question it asks is one I find compelling: how do you build well, and build sustainably, in a place that is being remade at speed?
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and our practice is now based in Oxford, just a short way up the line from Didcot. We have spent almost twenty years thinking about how buildings sit within the places they belong to — how materials, proportions, light and landscape come together to make homes that are comfortable, designed to last and built to use energy as efficiently as possible. That is the kind of thinking Didcot needs right now, and it is the kind of work we are best at.
Why Homeowners in Didcot Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects is a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered practice, and the kind of work Didcot demands — heritage-sensitive renovation on one hand, high-performance sustainable new build on the other — is precisely where our experience runs deepest. I am a member of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited with The Green Register, commitments that reflect a genuine investment in building science, not a line on a brochure. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes how we approach the other side of the work — the patient business of reading a building's fabric and understanding its logic before proposing anything new. A town with two conservation areas and listed buildings dating back centuries needs architects who can do both, and do both well.
Our project The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine. In 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. These are not credentials we collect for their own sake — they reflect the standards we hold every project to, whether it is a new home on the edge of Didcot or a sensitive renovation of one of the town's older buildings.
Architectural Services for a Town That Is Growing
New Build Design is at the heart of what Didcot needs. The Garden Town programme, backed by government funding, is delivering thousands of homes across new neighbourhoods, and the ambition is to create a place that people genuinely want to live in — not another sprawl of identikit housing, but a town with character, green space, and buildings that work. We share that ambition completely. Every new home we design begins with the same conviction: that sustainability is not a constraint but an opportunity to create something better. A home that is comfortable to live in, economical to run, and built to last is not a compromise — it is simply good architecture.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects. It is not an add-on or a tick-box exercise; it is the starting point. In a town that is growing as rapidly as Didcot, getting this right from the outset matters enormously. Orientation, natural light, thermal mass, ventilation, material choices — these are the decisions that determine whether a building will perform well for decades or become an energy liability within a generation. We design homes that are not only kinder to the planet but also more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in.
PassivHaus Design delivers the most rigorous standard of energy performance available. A Passivhaus home achieves exceptional thermal comfort through meticulous attention to insulation, airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — resulting in a building that maintains stable temperatures year-round with energy bills a fraction of those in a conventional house. For anyone building new in Didcot, where the Garden Town vision emphasises sustainable living, Passivhaus represents the gold standard.
For the many existing homes in Didcot — the estates built through the town's rapid twentieth-century expansion, from Ladygrove to Northbourne to the streets around the station — Extension Design is often the most practical way to gain the space a family needs without leaving a home they have made their own. The best extensions do more than add square metres. They reimagine how a home works: bringing light into rooms that never had enough, creating a better relationship between house and garden, improving the flow of daily life. In the Station Road conservation area, proposals must demonstrate genuine understanding of the historic setting, and that is precisely the kind of sensitive, context-aware design we specialise in.
EnerPHit offers a rigorous retrofit standard for those existing homes. Many houses in Didcot were built long before current energy standards existed, and EnerPHit is our approach to deep retrofit — a carefully engineered upgrade to the building's thermal envelope that dramatically reduces energy demand while making the home noticeably more comfortable. It is one of the most impactful things you can do to an existing building.
Renovations in Didcot range from the straightforward to the genuinely complex. The town's two conservation areas — Didcot Old, designated in 1979, and Station Road, designated in 1982 — contain buildings that require particular care. The Church of All Saints, with nave walls dating from around 1160, and White Cottage, a sixteenth-century timber-framed house on Manor Road, are reminders that beneath the modern town there is a much older settlement. Working with historic buildings means understanding their materials and construction before proposing changes — the lime mortars, the timber framing, the way these structures breathe and respond to moisture. That patient, attentive approach is central to how we practise.
Beyond the town, the countryside around Didcot — the villages of Long Wittenham and Brightwell-cum-Sotwell along the Thames, the farmland stretching south towards the Berkshire Downs — is where Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework comes into play. Paragraph 84 permits truly exceptional homes in the open countryside where the architecture genuinely enhances its setting. It is a demanding route and deliberately so, but for the right site and the right client it opens a remarkable opportunity to create something extraordinary.
Whether you are planning a new home in one of Didcot's emerging neighbourhoods, extending a family house that needs more room, or considering a deep retrofit to transform how your home performs, I would welcome the chance to talk it through. The best architecture begins with a conversation — about the building, the place, and how you want to live.
