On 28 May 1781 a fire swept through Great Horwood and reduced most of the village to ashes. The curate Jonathan Brigges wrote in the parish register: 'Greatest Part of the Town burnt down.' What rose from that destruction is what catches my eye as an architect — a village rebuilt in red brick, quickly and pragmatically, creating a Georgian streetscape that is remarkably unified in material and proportion. Walk around The Green today and you see house after house in that warm red brick, some with dated bricks from 1781 still visible in their walls, the Long House among them. Yet at the heart of it all stands St James's Church, its fourteenth-century coursed rubblestone completely untouched by the fire, the medieval tower and fifteenth-century aisles a reminder of what the village was before the flames changed everything. That tension between the stone that endured and the brick that replaced it — between survival and reinvention — is what makes Great Horwood such a compelling place to work as an architect.
Award-winning Architects in Great Horwood
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from our studio in Oxford with clients throughout the country. What draws me to places like Great Horwood is the way a single event can reshape a village's entire material character — the 1781 fire swept away timber and thatch, and what replaced them was brick, durable and fire-resistant, laid quickly but with a care for proportion that still reads clearly two and a half centuries later. That pragmatic rebuilding spirit resonates with how we approach architecture: respond to real conditions, work with honest materials, and create something that will last. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has deepened my understanding of how buildings survive and adapt, and our accreditation with The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust ensures that everything we design meets the highest standards of energy performance. The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire — an EnerPHit retrofit featured in The Modern House and The Spaces — showed that a period home can gain genuine thermal comfort without losing its character, while The Deerings in Hertfordshire won a RIBA East Award by proving that a new Passivhaus home can be architecturally ambitious, not just thermally efficient. We are ARB registered and RIBA Chartered, and as a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year and a judge at the British Homes Awards, I bring that breadth of experience to every project we take on.
Architectural Services for Homes in Great Horwood
Renovations in Great Horwood often mean working with the Georgian brick houses that were built in the years after the 1781 fire — solid-walled, simply detailed, with good proportions but the thermal limitations of their era. The village conservation area protects the character of The Green and the surrounding streets, and Buckinghamshire Council requires careful justification for any external alteration to these buildings. We welcome that discipline. Understanding a building's construction — how its brickwork was laid, what its mortar tells you about when and how it was built, whether a full-height stone wall from an earlier structure survives behind the Georgian facade, as it does at Yew Tree Cottage — is where every good renovation begins.
EnerPHit is particularly well suited to the solid-walled brick houses that define Great Horwood. Georgian brickwork has no cavity, which means heat loss is significant and conventional insulation approaches can trap moisture and damage the very fabric they are meant to protect. The EnerPHit standard addresses this intelligently — improving airtightness, introducing controlled ventilation, and placing insulation where it works with the building's moisture behaviour rather than against it. I have lived through a full winter in a home designed to Passivhaus standards, and the difference in comfort is profound: consistent warmth, no draughts, remarkable quiet. That same quality of living is achievable in a Georgian cottage in Great Horwood when the retrofit is done with precision and care.
Extension Design within the conservation area calls for a sensitivity to the proportional language that the post-fire rebuilding established — modest rooflines, regular fenestration, the warmth of that red brick. An extension need not mimic the Georgian originals, but it must sit alongside them with confidence and respect, using materials and proportions that are honest about being new while belonging to the same streetscape. Sustainable Design runs through all of our work, because buildings that use energy and materials efficiently are not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in.
PassivHaus Design applies the same calibrated physics to new construction, and for the few opportunities that arise within Great Horwood's settlement boundary — defined in the parish's Neighbourhood Plan, which passed its 2015 referendum with ninety-one per cent support — it offers a way to build homes that perform as well as any in the country while respecting the scale and character of the village. New Build Design beyond the settlement boundary falls under Paragraph 84 of the NPPF, a deliberately stringent rural policy that requires the architecture itself to justify the building's existence. That aligns with how we think: design quality not as decoration, but as the reason a building earns its place in the landscape.
Great Horwood remade itself after fire, and the red brick streetscape that rose from the ashes has proved just as enduring as the medieval stone church at its centre. If you are considering a project here — whether a careful renovation of one of those Georgian houses, an extension that respects the village's unified character, or something new in the surrounding countryside — we would welcome the conversation.