Every village tells you something about how a place adapts, but Lyneham tells you more than most. The parish name itself comes from the Anglo-Saxon for flax — lyne — and the fields that once produced linen gave way in 1940 to an RAF station that would define the village for over seventy years. Now, with the airfield reborn as MOD Lyneham and two hundred new homes taking shape at Tiger Moth Fields off Chippenham Road, the village is being remade again. What draws me to places like this is the layer beneath the change — the fourteenth-century tower of St Michael and All Angels still standing at the heart of the village, its nave and chancel rebuilt by William Butterfield in the 1860s with the bold polychromatic tiling he was famous for. Butterfield understood that working with an older building does not mean timidity. That instinct — confident intervention that respects what came before — is exactly how I think about architecture.
Award-winning Architects in Lyneham
Sustainable Design Led by Experience
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. We won the RIBA East Award in 2018 for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus new build in Hertfordshire that proved sustainable homes can be beautiful, comfortable and joyful to live in, and our restoration of The Great Barn, a Grade II listed barn in Buckinghamshire, shows the same care applied to historic fabric. I'm ARB-registered, RIBA Chartered, a member of SPAB, and accredited by The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine, and I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. That breadth matters in Lyneham, where the next chapter involves both new construction at scale and the stewardship of what already exists along the conservation area.
Designing for Lyneham's Next Chapter
New Build Design is at the heart of what Lyneham needs right now. The Tiger Moth Fields development — two hundred homes including affordable housing, a nursery and business units — is the largest change the village has seen since the RAF arrived in 1940. Growth on this scale brings an obligation to build well, and every new home is an opportunity to demonstrate that sustainability is not a constraint but an advantage: homes that are more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and more responsive to the north Wiltshire landscape they sit within. The Lyneham and Bradenstoke Neighbourhood Development Plan, made in 2021, sets clear expectations, and Wiltshire Council as the local planning authority will look for design quality that contributes to the village rather than merely expanding it.
Sustainable Design takes on particular weight when so many homes are being built at once. The choices made now — orientation, insulation strategy, glazing ratios, materials — will determine the energy performance of these buildings for decades. We use fabric-first principles to reduce energy demand before any technology is added. PassivHaus Design takes this approach to its most rigorous conclusion, and at The Deerings we demonstrated that a Passivhaus home holds steady internal temperatures year-round with almost no active heating — a standard that makes particular sense for new construction on open agricultural land.
Extension Design matters for the homes that are already here — the stone and rubble cottages along the main street within Lyneham's conservation area, whose proportions reflect centuries of the same north Wiltshire limestone tradition, and the mid-twentieth-century houses built for RAF families. An extension to a cottage within the conservation area must respect the existing roofline, the scale of the original openings, and the materials palette that gives the older part of the village its coherence — Wiltshire Council will expect any work here to preserve or enhance that character. The post-war housing stock is a different proposition — more functional, less constrained — and a well-designed extension can bring light, space, and thermal performance to a building that was never designed with those qualities in mind.
Renovations in Lyneham begin with understanding how these buildings were put together. The Grade II listed Church of St Michael and All Angels is the most visible example — Butterfield did not simply patch the medieval fabric in the 1860s, he rebuilt the chancel and re-roofed the nave with conviction, and his polychromatic tiling remains one of the most distinctive interiors in the parish. Our approach draws on SPAB principles: honest repair, minimum intervention where the building is sound, and a willingness to be bold where boldness is warranted. EnerPHit offers a retrofit path for the solid-walled mid-century homes that make up a significant share of the housing stock in Lyneham, wrapping existing structures in a carefully modelled insulation envelope to achieve near-Passivhaus levels of comfort and efficiency.
The open countryside around Lyneham — the rolling farmland between the village and Royal Wootton Bassett, the chalk valleys and dip slopes that once grew the flax that gave the parish its name — falls under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework. This is the route for truly exceptional homes in the rural landscape, where any new building must not just be sustainable but must demonstrate that it belongs in the landscape it occupies. The relationship between building and land needs to be considered from the very first sketch, and we have experience with the particular demands of Paragraph 84, where design quality is a planning requirement and the burden of proof sits entirely with the architect.
Lyneham has been shaped by agriculture, by aviation, and now by the energy and ambition of a new phase of growth. The buildings that come next — whether a new home at Tiger Moth Fields, an extension to a cottage on the main street, or a renovation that brings an older property into the twenty-first century — deserve the same care and imagination that Butterfield brought to the chancel of St Michael's. If you are considering a project in Lyneham, we would welcome the conversation.