Some villages sit comfortably in the middle of nowhere. Kennington sits at the edge of somewhere — Oxford's southern doorstep, the Thames on one side, the A34 on the other, and twelve centuries of settlement in between. What draws my eye here is the Jacobean Manor House on Kennington Road, built in 1629 during the Great Rebuilding, a building that belongs entirely to this place and yet speaks of an ambition that looked well beyond it. That mix of rootedness and aspiration is something I recognise, because it is what the best architecture does — it belongs to where it is while reaching for something more.
A charter of 821 by Coenwulf, King of the Mercians, mentions Kennington by name. The parish church of St Swithun, designed in 1828 by Daniel Robertson in a very early Norman Revival style, still anchors the village. Walk through today and you see thatched cottages, the Manor House, Victorian terraces, inter-war semis, and the residential growth of the later twentieth century, all woven into a strip of land between the river and the road. It is a village that has kept growing, and the question of how it grows next is one that matters.
An Award-Winning Practice on Kennington's Doorstep
Gresford Architects is based at the Eco Centre in Osney Mead, Oxford — just a few minutes north of Kennington. I founded the practice in London in 2006 and later moved to Oxford. I am ARB Registered and RIBA Chartered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust, SPAB, and The Green Register. Those memberships matter most in places like Kennington, where the design quality of new development directly shapes a village's future and where older buildings demand architects who understand both performance and restraint.
Our work has been recognised by RIBA — an East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home, and a South Awards shortlist for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. What matters most for a village facing the kind of growth Kennington has been allocated is not the awards themselves but what they represent: buildings that perform well, that last well, and that respect their setting.
How We Work with Homeowners in Kennington
Kennington falls within the planning authority of Vale of White Horse District Council, and the village sits within the Oxford Green Belt. The Green Belt designation shapes what can be built and where, but it does not prevent good architecture — it demands it. The Vale of White Horse Local Plan 2031 has allocated land to the south of Kennington for around 270 new homes, a significant expansion for a village of this size and one that makes the design quality of new development a genuine community concern.
Two hundred and seventy new homes is a significant number for a village like Kennington. New Build Design at that scale matters. A new home here needs to answer to the brick of the Victorian terraces, the rhythm of the older lanes, the river and meadow landscape beyond. We design new homes that use daylight, orientation, and natural ventilation as active design tools, giving their owners buildings that perform well from day one.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do. For Kennington, where Green Belt policy rightly sets a high bar for what gets built, sustainability is not optional — it is the baseline. A new home on the allocated land south of the village should use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, not as a marketing claim but as a commitment that shows in the building itself. Passivhaus Design takes that principle to its most rigorous expression: exceptional airtightness and insulation that require almost no conventional heating, and indoor air quality that most conventional houses cannot match. The Deerings, our certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, proved that this standard works beautifully in a domestic English setting. For the new development in Kennington, it offers something that matters: genuine, measurable performance.
Extension Design is equally relevant in Kennington, where the inter-war semis, post-war detached homes, and later twentieth-century estates were built to layouts that no longer suit how families live. A well-designed extension rethinks how the whole house works — drawing daylight deeper into the plan, creating a stronger connection between inside and garden. In the Green Belt, extensions must be proportionate, which is exactly the discipline that produces the best results.
Renovations are where much of Kennington's architectural character lives. The thatched cottages along Kennington Road, the Victorian terraces, the Manor House itself — each represents a moment in the village's growth. Renovation is not about imposing a new idea on what already exists. It is about listening to what the building does well and finding the intervention that makes it work better — warmer, brighter, more efficient — while remaining unmistakably itself.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is particularly suited to the solid-walled homes that make up much of the mid-century housing stock in Kennington. It treats insulation, airtightness, ventilation, and window performance as a coordinated system, delivering dramatic improvements in comfort and running costs. The Old Orchard, our own EnerPHit project in Oxfordshire, demonstrated that a rigorous retrofit can transform performance while preserving external character.
The countryside around Kennington — the Thames meadows, the fields stretching south towards Radley and Sunningwell — also raises the possibility of building under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework, the route for a truly outstanding house in open countryside where the design must demonstrably enhance its setting.
Kennington has been here since the Mercian kings, and it is still changing. Whether you are planning an extension to a family home, considering a new build on one of the village's allocated sites, or thinking about a retrofit that will transform how your home performs for decades to come, I would welcome the chance to talk it through.
