The name gives it away. Longford — a long ford — describes the causeway that carries the road north from Gloucester across the watermeadows between the Wotton and Horsbere brooks. This is a village that exists because of water, or more precisely because of the need to cross it. Walk the length of the settlement and you can read that origin in the buildings: timber frames and brick rather than the Cotswold stone found on higher ground, plots arranged along the raised road with meadows falling away on either side. What draws me to places like this is the way architecture has always had to negotiate with the landscape beneath it. At Manor Farm in the north of the village, a timber-framed farmhouse stands beside its early eighteenth-century brick wing — two centuries of building, side by side, each responding to the same damp, low-lying ground in its own way.
Award-winning Architects in Longford
An Experienced Practice Working Across the Country
Gresford Architects grew out of a conviction that how a building performs matters as much as how it looks — and in a village where water shapes everything, that conviction is not abstract. I set up the practice in London in 2006 and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, with memberships of SPAB and the Passivhaus Trust that reflect two commitments we see as closely aligned: sensitive renovation of older buildings and rigorous low-energy design. Our work on The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. Projects like these — and features in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, and The Modern House Journal — come from the same place: a belief that buildings should be comfortable, efficient, and designed to last. In Longford, where timber frames have been managing damp ground since the medieval period, that belief is tested on every job.
Architecture for a Village Shaped by Water
Many of the older houses in Longford began as modest dwellings — cottages built close to the causeway with small rooms suited to a different era. Extension Design that works in sympathy with timber frame and brick can open a house to its garden, bring natural light where it is now lacking, or add the bedrooms a growing family needs. Tewkesbury Borough Council handles planning for Longford, and any addition needs to read naturally alongside the village's mixed-period character — medieval timber frames in the north, twentieth-century infill further south, all sitting on the same raised road above the watermeadows.
Renovations in Longford call for a particular understanding of how older buildings work in damp conditions. A timber-framed house like the one at Manor Farm has spent centuries managing moisture through breathable materials — lime plaster, lime mortar, softwood frames that flex and settle. Cement render, impermeable membranes, and modern damp-proof courses can trap moisture inside these structures and cause more damage than the problems they were meant to solve. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous alternative: improving airtightness, adding insulation in the right places, and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all while respecting the way a traditional building breathes. For a village on a flood plain, where ground moisture is a constant companion rather than an occasional nuisance, getting this balance right is not optional — it is the difference between a renovation that lasts and one that stores up problems for the next decade.
Sustainable Design in Longford starts with water — managing it, working with it, understanding how the ground behaves. The village sits on a flood plain, so any new work here has to be designed with that reality in mind: breathable materials, careful positioning, thermal mass where it helps, and drainage that works with the watermeadow landscape rather than against it. These are not abstract principles but practical answers to what this particular place demands. For sites beyond the settlement boundary, in the open countryside of the Severn Vale, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework can provide a pathway for genuinely exceptional architecture.
New Build Design in Longford is particularly sensitive. The village's character comes from the way buildings sit along the causeway, responding to the land they stand on rather than imposing a template from elsewhere. New houses need to understand that grain — the raised road, the fall of the meadows either side, the vernacular language of timber frame and brick that distinguishes this part of Gloucestershire from the Cotswold stone villages on higher ground. PassivHaus Design offers a rigorous framework for homes that are genuinely comfortable and efficient — superinsulated, airtight, with mechanical ventilation and heat recovery — and what appeals about it in a place like Longford is that it is engineered for actual performance in real conditions, not for show.
Longford has been building along its causeway for the best part of a thousand years, each generation finding its own way to work with the water and the land. If you are planning an extension, a renovation, or a new home in the village, we would welcome the conversation.