The High Street in Moreton-in-Marsh is unusually broad for a Cotswold market town, and the reason lies about three feet beneath the surface. The Fosse Way — the Roman road that ran from Exeter to Lincoln — passes directly under the modern street, and when the Abbot of Westminster laid out the town's market in the thirteenth century, he built along that alignment rather than against it. The result is a main street that feels generous and open, lined with buildings of honey-coloured Cotswold limestone that have been added to, altered and rebuilt over seven centuries but still follow the logic of a route that was old before any of them existed. The sixteenth-century Curfew Tower stands at the corner of Oxford Street with a bell cast in 1633 that was rung every evening until 1860 — a nightly reminder to cover fires in a town where thatch was still the dominant roofing material. It is a small, practical building with a lock-up at its base, and it tells you something essential about Moreton-in-Marsh: this is a place where architecture has always served the community first and expressed itself second.
Award-winning Architects in Moreton-in-Marsh
Why Homeowners in Moreton-in-Marsh Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My background — trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust — reflects the two threads that run through everything we do: a deep respect for the buildings that already exist and a conviction that new work should perform as well as current knowledge allows. In a Cotswold market town like Moreton-in-Marsh, where the conservation area covers much of the historic core and Cotswold District Council expects proposals to respond sensitively to the local stone palette and streetscape, those two instincts work together rather than in tension. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018 and demonstrated that environmental rigour and architectural quality can be the same thing. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. But what matters most in a place like Moreton-in-Marsh is the willingness to listen — to the building, to the street, to the planning context — before putting pencil to paper.
Architectural Services for Homes in Moreton-in-Marsh
Renovations in Moreton-in-Marsh often begin with buildings that have already been through several lives. The coaching inns and townhouses along the High Street were built for a town that thrived as a staging post on the Fosse Way, and many have been adapted, subdivided and extended over the centuries in ways that obscure their original character. Good renovation work reads those layers — understanding which interventions were thoughtful and which were expedient, deciding what to keep and what to carefully undo. Within the conservation area, Cotswold District Council will expect proposals to preserve the Cotswold stone frontages and the rhythm of the streetscape, and that discipline suits the way we work. As a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, I approach historic fabric with the conviction that what you choose not to do matters as much as what you add. The Redesdale Hall, completed in 1887 for Sir Algernon Freeman-Mitford, later the 1st Baron Redesdale, is a good example of a building that confidently announced its era while respecting the materials and scale of its neighbours — the kind of balance we aim for in every renovation project.
Extension Design is one of our most frequent commissions, and in Moreton-in-Marsh the opportunities are shaped by the town's particular character. Many homes in the historic core sit on plots that were drawn up along the Fosse Way alignment centuries ago — long, narrow gardens behind stone frontages that lend themselves to carefully considered rear extensions, garden rooms or kitchen reconfigurations. The challenge is to create contemporary space that respects the proportions and materials of the existing building while genuinely improving how a family uses their home. We find that the constraints of a conservation area setting — where sympathetic rooflines and honest materials matter as much as the space inside — tend to draw out genuinely considered architecture in ways that unconstrained freedom rarely achieves.
EnerPHit is the Passivhaus Institute's certified standard for the retrofit of existing buildings, and it is particularly well suited to the solid stone construction that characterises much of Moreton-in-Marsh. Cotswold limestone walls are handsome and durable but thermally inefficient, and many homes in the town lose heat at a rate that their owners feel in both comfort and running costs. EnerPHit provides a rigorous route to transforming that performance — careful internal insulation, improved airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — without altering the external appearance that the conservation area protects. I have lived in a home designed to Passivhaus standards, so the difference this makes is not abstract to me: the stillness, the even temperature, the sense that the building is working with you rather than against you. It changes how you inhabit a place.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects, from material choices to orientation and energy strategy. Moreton-in-Marsh was laid out along a Roman road, and that early decision — to follow the Fosse Way rather than fight the contours — set the town's relationship with its landscape for eight centuries. That instinct, to work with what is already there rather than against it, is what sustainability means to us: a return to principles that the town's builders understood long before the word existed. PassivHaus Design takes those principles to their most rigorous standard, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating, an approach that makes particular sense for new buildings in the Cotswolds where winters are damp and stone buildings can feel slow to warm. New Build Design in Moreton-in-Marsh must navigate the expectations of Cotswold District Council and the Cotswolds National Landscape designation, which together demand that new homes contribute positively to their setting rather than simply filling available land. For sites in the rural landscape beyond the town, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional new homes where standard development would not be permitted — but only where the design is genuinely outstanding and sensitive to its context.
Moreton-in-Marsh has been a town shaped by its position on a route — from the Roman soldiers who marched the Fosse Way, to the medieval traders who filled its market, to the coaching traffic that built its inns and townhouses. That sense of connection and movement has always been part of its character. Whether you are renovating a stone-built home in the conservation area, extending a property to better suit how your family lives, improving the thermal performance of a building that deserves to be comfortable as well as beautiful, or planning something new in the Cotswold landscape, we would welcome the conversation.