In 1765, the parish of Longwick made a decision that has stayed with me since I first read about it. The medieval nave of St Michael and All Angels had fallen beyond practical repair, and rather than rebuild the church in full, the parishioners demolished the nave entirely and raised a modest west tower in its place — keeping the fifteenth-century Perpendicular chancel, with its carved gargoyles, three-light windows and early sixteenth-century screen, intact. It is a quiet act of architectural pragmatism: save what matters, build honestly where you must, and waste nothing. Longwick sits at the foot of the Chilterns escarpment, where the chalk hills give way to the clay vale, and that same practical sensibility runs through the village. The name itself comes from the Old English for "long farm," and the settlement that grew along the road from Princes Risborough still carries that elongated, unhurried character — brick and flint farmsteads, timber-framed houses, tile roofs at the edge of the hills. For an architect, it is a place where every project begins with listening to what is already there.
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I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. The vale villages beneath the Chilterns escarpment — places where brick farmsteads sit against a backdrop of chalk downland, where conservation areas hold centuries of adaptation in a handful of streets — are landscapes that draw out the best in what we do. I am RIBA Chartered and ARB registered, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a conviction that the most rewarding architectural conversations happen with buildings that already have stories to tell, buildings like those along Longwick's road. When we designed The Deerings, our Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, it won a RIBA East Award in 2018 — and that project taught me that genuine sustainability and genuine beauty are not competing ambitions but the same one. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited on The Green Register, because the marriage of the poetic and the practical is what drives every project we take on.
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Renovations are central to what we do, and in a village with the depth of built heritage that Longwick possesses, they demand particular care. The conservation area contains fourteen listed buildings, and St Michael and All Angels itself is listed at Grade II* — a recognition of its exceptional interest. Redhouse Farmhouse, dating from the seventeenth century and rebuilt in the mid-eighteenth with its fine red and vitreous brick facade, is a reminder of how buildings in Longwick have always been adapted and improved rather than replaced. Working within the conservation area, and with Buckinghamshire Council as the planning authority, requires an architect who understands the balance between preserving character and making a home genuinely liveable. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her perspective has deepened my own respect for the way older buildings tell their stories through material, proportion and the accumulated decisions of generations.
EnerPHit offers a transformative path for the older homes that give Longwick its character. A farmhouse like Redhouse — solid walls, generous proportions, beautiful brickwork, but draughty and expensive to heat — is exactly the kind of building where the EnerPHit retrofit standard, developed by the Passivhaus Institute, can make the greatest difference. The approach is fabric-first: improved insulation, careful airtightness, balanced mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. Within Longwick's conservation area, where the external appearance of brick and flint walls, traditional window proportions and old tile roofs must be respected, this work demands an architect who can deliver transformative performance without erasing the character that earned the protection in the first place.
Extension Design is often the next conversation for families in Longwick who need more space but love where they live. The village's location at the foot of the Chilterns escarpment means that views, landscape setting and the relationship between a house and its garden all matter when planning an addition. Buckinghamshire Council will assess any proposal against the policies of the Longwick-cum-Ilmer Neighbourhood Plan, adopted in 2018, which sets clear expectations for design quality in the parish. We welcome that framework — the best extensions are born from constraint, where the discipline of responding to a setting produces something more considered and more beautiful than an open brief ever could.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and it carries particular weight in a village at the threshold between the Chilterns and the vale. Building here means thinking carefully about materials, orientation and long-term performance — about how a home sits in its landscape as well as how it performs for the people inside it. PassivHaus Design takes this to its highest measurable standard, virtually eliminating the need for conventional heating. I have lived in a Passivhaus home, and the difference in comfort and running costs is something I describe from direct experience rather than theory.
New Build Design on sites in and around Longwick — where the parish's Neighbourhood Plan guides appropriate development — is an opportunity to build to the highest environmental standards from the ground up, using the local palette of brick, flint and tile. For sites in the open countryside beyond the village, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes where the quality of the architecture itself must justify planning permission, a challenge that calls for the same pragmatic ambition those 1765 parishioners understood.
The parishioners who rebuilt St Michael's tower in 1765 understood something that still holds true: good building is about making thoughtful decisions with the materials and the setting you have. If you are considering a project in Longwick, whether renovating, extending or building something new at the foot of these hills, we would welcome the conversation.