Drybrook is a village that has always been built from necessity rather than design. The first cottages appeared on the extraparochial Forest waste in the late eighteenth century — just twelve in 1782, clustered where the parish of Ruardean met the Crown woodland — and by 1817 the growing community had its own church, Holy Trinity, raised on Quarry Hill as a free chapel and only the second Anglican church to be established in the entire Forest of Dean. That sequence tells you something about the character of this place: people settled here because the land and the geology provided a living, and the institutions followed. Two centuries later, Drybrook is classified as a major village in the Forest of Dean Allocations Plan, with land identified for around one hundred and ten new homes, and the question facing this community is the same one it has faced since those first cottages went up — how to grow in a way that respects what is already here.
Award-winning Architects in Drybrook
An Award-winning Practice Working Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. We hold ARB registration and RIBA chartered status, and our memberships include the Passivhaus Trust, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and The Green Register. Our project The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, and The Modern House Journal. What connects all of it is a conviction that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and as efficient with energy and materials as possible — principles that matter as much in a growing Forest village like Drybrook as they do anywhere.
Architecture for a Village That Is Still Growing
New Build Design is where Drybrook's most significant architectural opportunity lies right now. The Forest of Dean Allocations Plan identifies Drybrook and Harrow Hill as a major village and allocates land for approximately one hundred and ten new dwellings, including a site of around fifty homes off High Street and a smaller allocation at Drybrook Farm. The Mannings Farm development has already introduced fifty-one modular homes to the village, a scheme that demonstrates both the appetite for new housing and the importance of getting the design right. Forest of Dean District Council's Residential Design Guide makes clear that new development must reflect the traditional characteristics, styles, and materials of its locality — in Drybrook, that means responding to the informal layout of the older village, the Forest of Dean stone that defines its nineteenth-century cottages, and the relationship between settlement and surrounding woodland. We design new homes that meet these expectations not as a concession to planning policy but because buildings that belong to their place are better buildings — more comfortable, more economical, and more likely to be valued by the people who live in them for decades to come.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through every project we take on, and it carries particular weight in a village where new housing is arriving at scale. Fabric performance comes first: the orientation of the building, the quality of the airtightness layer, the thermal mass of the walls, the way the glazing balances solar gain with overheating risk. In Drybrook, where the topography drops away towards the valley and the tree canopy of the Forest moderates wind exposure, a home designed this way can achieve genuinely low energy demand without relying on complex mechanical systems — kinder to the planet, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in.
Extension Design addresses the reality of the existing housing stock. Drybrook has grown in distinct phases — the early stone cottages along the High Street and up towards Harrow Hill, the twentieth-century expansion that followed the decline of the mining industry, and more recent infill between the two. Many of these homes were built compact, and a well-designed extension can transform how a family uses a house without losing what drew them to it. The informal arrangement of buildings along narrow lanes is identified by the Council's design guidance as a characteristic worth protecting, so extensions need to work within the existing grain — respecting plot boundaries, maintaining the rhythm of the streetscape, and using materials that sit comfortably alongside the local stone.
Renovations are equally relevant for the older properties in the parish, particularly the stone-built cottages with their thick walls, small windows, and layouts shaped by a time when heating came from a single fireplace. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous methodology for bringing these buildings closer to modern comfort — improving airtightness and insulation systematically, introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — without compromising the solid stone fabric. PassivHaus Design takes the same principles further for new construction, engineering superinsulation and heat recovery into homes that need almost no conventional heating. For sites beyond the settlement boundary, where the Forest itself begins, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for genuinely exceptional architecture in the open countryside.
Drybrook has been growing since those first twelve cottages were built on the Forest waste, and the next chapter of that growth is already under way. If you are planning a new home, an extension, or a renovation in the village, we would welcome the chance to talk about how to make it something that belongs here as naturally as the buildings that came before.