Most towns reveal their character gradually. Marlborough announces it the moment you step onto the High Street — that extraordinary width, the colonnaded walkways along the north side where Doric columns hold up tiled pentice roofs, the whole composition stretching from St Peter's at the western end to St Mary's at the east. Except it was not designed at all, not in the conventional sense. What you are looking at is the result of catastrophe. The Great Fire of April 1653 tore through the medieval town, destroying 244 houses, the Guildhall, and much of St Mary's Church in four hours. Further fires followed in 1679 and 1690, and by the time Marlborough finished rebuilding, an Act of Parliament had banned thatch altogether. The town that rose from the ashes was wider, more deliberately planned, and built in brick and tile rather than the timber and thatch that had fed the flames. I find that story compelling because it is fundamentally an architectural one — a community using the act of rebuilding not just to recover but to reimagine how a town could work. The colonnades are a perfect example: practical shelter, elegant in their repetition, and completely distinctive.
Award-winning Architects in Marlborough
An Architect's Credentials for a Town That Rebuilt Itself
Marlborough's 292 listed buildings tell a story of constant reinvention — sarsen stone at the base, post-fire brick and tile in the middle, Georgian and Victorian refinements above — and working with that kind of layered character is what I find most rewarding. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. 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 honest repair and minimum intervention shapes how we approach every heritage project. We are also members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, because the real challenge in a town shaped by successive rebuilding is making those buildings work for the people who live in them now — comfortable, efficient, designed to endure. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House and The Spaces, brought a period home up to near-Passivhaus performance. The Deerings in Hertfordshire won the RIBA East Award in 2018. That range — from certified new builds to sensitive heritage retrofits — is precisely what Marlborough demands, because no single approach can do justice to a place where four centuries of architectural ambition sit side by side.
Designing for Marlborough's Layered Character
Extension Design in Marlborough demands an architect who can work within tight constraints and still produce something that feels inevitable. The High Street properties sit on long, narrow plots running back from the colonnaded frontages, and the courtyards behind them — Kingsbury Square is one of the finest, where a narrow opening between terraced houses leads into a secluded garden square framed by red brick cottages — mean that every extension is visible from unexpected angles. An addition to a listed property here must respond to the roofline, the proportions, and the particular rhythm of the street. Where the conservation area limits outward expansion, the answer often lies in working with the section: opening internal volumes, introducing carefully positioned rooflights, or creating half-level connections that draw light down through a building. Wiltshire Council expects proposals to preserve or enhance the area's special character, and we see that as a productive discipline. The colonnaded walkways themselves are proof that architectural invention and practical constraint can work together beautifully.
Renovations are central to any serious architectural work in Marlborough. The town's 292 listed buildings include the Grade I listed Church of St Mary — founded in the twelfth century, partly rebuilt after the 1653 fire, its tower added in the fifteenth century — and the Grade II* Church of St Peter, begun around 1460 and now a community space after being declared redundant in 1974. But the real depth lies in the hundreds of Grade II properties along the High Street and the lanes behind it: post-fire houses in brick with tile-hung upper storeys, Georgian frontages masking older timber frames, and the occasional surviving sarsen stone wall from before the fires changed everything. Renovating these buildings means understanding how each layer relates to the next, where original fabric survives beneath later alterations, and how to bring a seventeenth-century house up to modern standards of comfort without losing the character that earned it protection.
The thermal performance of Marlborough's post-fire housing stock is its greatest vulnerability. Brick walls, tile-hung facades, and single-glazed timber sash windows lose heat steadily through the colder months. EnerPHit — our certified retrofit standard — brings these properties up to near-PassivHaus levels of comfort through carefully detailed insulation, airtightness improvements, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all designed to work with the existing fabric rather than against it. The tile-hung upper storeys so characteristic of Marlborough's High Street present a specific technical challenge: insulation must be detailed to avoid trapping moisture behind the tile battens, and ventilation paths must be maintained to protect the timber structure beneath. Every intervention is modelled and tested before it is applied, because in a listed building the margin for error is precisely zero.
Sustainability in Marlborough means understanding the grain of the place. The North Wessex Downs National Landscape surrounds the town — a designation that gives the conservation and enhancement of natural beauty great weight in planning decisions — and the built environment carries centuries of accumulated craft in its materials and forms. Our Sustainable Design approach starts with the building itself: reducing energy demand through fabric-first thinking, respecting the layers of history that make each property distinctive, and drawing on the same logic the post-fire builders applied when they chose brick and tile over the thatch that had burned. PassivHaus Design sets the most rigorous standard for new construction, achieving exceptional comfort through superinsulation, airtightness, and passive solar gain. Even where full certification is not the aim, those principles shape every project.
New Build Design opportunities in Marlborough are shaped by the National Landscape and conservation area, but they do arise. Wiltshire Council's Local Plan directs some 680 new homes to the town, and the Marlborough Area Neighbourhood Plan allocates specific sites for market and affordable housing. Any new building here must earn its place in a town with four thousand years of human settlement — the Marlborough Mound, a Neolithic monument carbon-dated to around 2400 BC and the second largest of its kind in Europe, is a vivid reminder of how long people have been shaping this landscape. Beyond the town, the chalk downland and dry valleys of the North Wessex Downs offer the kind of setting where Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework comes into play — a route to exceptional new homes in the open countryside, where outstanding design and sensitivity to the landscape can justify development that would not otherwise be permitted.
The builders who raised the colonnades and wide brick facades after 1653 were not simply replacing what was lost — they were making something new, something that three and a half centuries later still defines how this place looks and feels. If you are considering a project in Marlborough or the surrounding downland — an extension that works with the grain of the High Street, the renovation of a listed property, or something entirely new — we would welcome the conversation.