In the 1870s, Lord Clifton, then Lord of the Manor, demolished almost all the thatched cottages of Naseby and replaced them with red-brick estate cottages for his workers. The village's medieval character — the buildings that had survived the Black Death, the Civil War and two centuries of agricultural change — was swept away in a single programme of improvement. Only two seventeenth-century thatched cottages survived. What interests me as an architect is the lesson that well-intentioned intervention can do more damage than neglect. The battle that gave Naseby its fame was fought in the fields to the north on 14 June 1645; the battlefield landscape has survived largely intact because nobody built on it. The village's own historic buildings were not so fortunate. The Church of All Saints, Grade II* listed, remains — its core dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Saxon stonework reused in its walls and a twelfth-century font that is the oldest surviving object in the building.
Award-winning Architects in Naseby
Conservation Training for Every Project
Working in a village that lost its historic fabric to a single owner's vision requires an architect who understands the difference between improvement and erasure. 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 careful repair runs through everything our practice does. As a member of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, I bring the same rigour to energy performance that my SPAB training brings to heritage. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, the year I was also a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. Our projects have been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal.
Architectural Services South of Market Harborough
Renovations in Naseby engage with two distinct building stocks: the Victorian estate cottages that replaced the medieval village, and the older buildings that survived the clearance. The church retains its thirteenth-century nave with clerestory and aisles, a fourteenth-century tower now carrying a spire added in 1859–60 to the designs of William Slater, and a chancel rebuilt in 1830. The surviving thatched cottages from the seventeenth century offer a glimpse of what the rest of the village once looked like. West Northamptonshire Council handles planning for the parish. Through my membership of SPAB, I approach these buildings with the understanding that solid walls manage moisture through their mass and their lime mortar — and that any renovation must work with that behaviour.
Extension Design in Naseby must navigate the village's unusual character — a largely Victorian settlement on a medieval plan, with the church and a handful of older buildings as the historic survivors. An extension to a Victorian estate cottage faces different challenges from an extension to a seventeenth-century thatched cottage, but both require the same respect for what exists. Whether the brief is a ground-floor extension connecting the house to the garden, a garden room, or additional space above, the design should make the whole building feel more resolved.
Sustainable Design connects every project we take on, and in Naseby the surviving battlefield landscape offers a reminder that what we choose not to build on matters as much as what we build. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new construction, delivering certified comfort with minimal energy demand. New Build Design in Naseby should respond to the mixed character of a village that includes Georgian houses, Victorian cottages and medieval survivors. For sites in the countryside around the parish, where the battlefield's open fields have been protected as a registered historic landscape, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to architecturally outstanding homes — but the design must be sensitive to ground that carries national significance.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, addresses the thermal performance of older homes without compromising their character. The cottages in Naseby — whether Victorian brick or seventeenth-century stone — present the challenge of solid-walled construction: thick walls with no insulation, draughty junctions, and a building envelope that predates any concept of thermal efficiency. Vapour-open insulation, careful airtightness detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can transform them — warmer, quieter, dramatically cheaper to run — while the facades continue to weather as they always have.
Naseby lost its thatched cottages to improvement; its battlefield survived because nobody built on it. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the conversation.