In 2022, archaeologists excavating ahead of a housing development at Harpole uncovered the most significant early medieval female burial ever discovered in Britain. The Harpole Treasure, dating from around the mid-seventh century, included a gold necklace of thirty pendants set with garnets and semi-precious stones — the most ornate of its kind ever found — along with a large silver cross, a copper bowl and Frankish pottery. The burial belonged to a woman of high standing in the early Christian church, laid to rest on ground that sits four miles west of Northampton. What strikes me as an architect is the intersection: extraordinary archaeology revealed by the act of building. Every development in a place this old is also an excavation, and respect for what lies beneath is not a constraint on good design — it is a dimension of it.
Award-winning Architects in Harpole
Conservation Understanding, Environmental Ambition
Working in a village where a Roman villa site was identified in the 1840s and a seventh-century burial emerged in 2022 requires an architect who treats the ground as carefully as the building above it. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered architect and a member of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — whose philosophy of careful repair runs through everything our practice does. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. As a member of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, I bring the same rigour to energy performance that my SPAB training brings to heritage. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, the year I was also a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. Our projects have been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal.
Architectural Services West of Northampton
Renovations in Harpole engage with a village whose linear arrangement reflects its manorial and agricultural origins. The Church of All Saints, medieval in origin with a clerestoried nave, aisles and a western tower carrying crocketed pinnacles, is built from the local ironstone that characterises the older village. Along the main street, stone cottages sit alongside later brick houses and farm buildings, creating a building stock that spans several centuries of construction. Harpole was also a centre for the shoemaking trade, and many houses were extended during the nineteenth century to accommodate the workshops where uppers were hand-stitched — an early form of live-work architecture that gives some properties an unusual plan. West Northamptonshire Council handles planning for the parish. Through my membership of SPAB, I approach these buildings with the understanding that each material — ironstone, brick, lime mortar — has its own behaviour, and any renovation must work with it.
Extension Design in Harpole benefits from the village's own history of adaptation. The shoemaking workshops that were added to residential properties in the nineteenth century show that extending a house to accommodate new uses is nothing new here — and the best of those extensions worked because they respected the proportions and materials of the original building. The same principle applies today. Whether the brief is a ground-floor extension that opens up the kitchen, a garden room, or additional space above, the design should respond to the existing house — its materials, its scale, its relationship to the street — and make the whole feel more resolved.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, addresses the thermal performance of older homes without compromising their character. The ironstone and brick cottages in Harpole present the familiar challenge of solid-walled construction: thick walls with no insulation, draughty junctions, and a building envelope that predates any notion of thermal efficiency. Vapour-open insulation, careful airtightness detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can transform these homes — warmer, quieter, dramatically cheaper to run — while the street-facing character remains unchanged.
Sustainable Design connects every project we take on, and in Harpole it carries a particular weight. The Harpole Treasure was revealed because archaeologists were given the time and resources to excavate properly before development began — a reminder that sustainable development means thinking about what exists before deciding what to add. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new construction, delivering certified comfort with minimal energy demand. New Build Design in Harpole should sit comfortably within the village's established character. For sites in the countryside around the parish, where the River Nene defines the southern boundary and the landscape holds evidence of settlement spanning two millennia, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to architecturally outstanding homes — but the design must be worthy of the ground it stands on.
Harpole is a village where what lies beneath matters as much as what stands above. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the conversation.