Most villages grow slowly — a church, a handful of farms, a pub, and then centuries of gradual accretion. Northway arrived differently. Until the Second World War it was barely a hamlet on the flat ground north-east of Tewkesbury where the Carrant Brook drains towards the Avon. Then came the Dowty factory in old railway buildings at Ashchurch, and the prisoner-of-war camp that sprang up beside it. When the war ended the camp closed and the houses came — a post-war estate built on the site of Camp 1009, followed by pre-fabricated homes, then 1960s development, then steady expansion right up to the present day. The result is a village whose architecture tells a story not of centuries but of decades, each one layered onto the last with the urgency of a growing community. For an architect, that presents a particular kind of opportunity: homes that were built quickly and practically, now ready to be made comfortable, efficient and genuinely good to live in.
Award-winning Architects in Northway
Why Homeowners in Northway 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 training at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow shaped a lasting interest in how buildings perform and how they feel to inhabit — two things that should never be separated. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited with The Green Register. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards the same year. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. What connects all of it — and what matters for homes in Northway — is the conviction that every house deserves to be comfortable, designed to last, and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, regardless of when it was built.
Architectural Services for Homes in Northway
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through everything we do, and in Northway it takes on a particular relevance. This is a village that has already learned what happens when buildings and landscape are not considered together — the 2007 floods damaged homes across the area, including properties on the Saxon Park development that were less than a year old, built on the former Dowty Seals factory site. Sustainability here means designing with an honest understanding of the ground conditions on this low-lying stretch of the Severn Vale, the flood risk that Tewkesbury Borough Council has documented in detail, and the energy performance of a housing stock built before thermal efficiency was a serious consideration. Resilience, comfort, long-term performance — not a label, but a way of building that makes life measurably better.
Extension Design is often the most practical route to a better home in Northway, where much of the housing stock dates from the post-war decades and follows layouts that no longer suit how families live. The estate that grew from the former Camp 1009 site was built to meet an urgent need, and the homes that followed through the 1960s were designed to similar patterns — compact rooms, small kitchens, limited connection to the garden. A well-designed rear or side extension can open a house to light and space without losing the solidity that makes these homes worth keeping. We design extensions that feel like a natural continuation of the existing house rather than an afterthought, working within the planning framework set by Tewkesbury Borough Council.
EnerPHit is the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, and it is particularly well suited to the kind of housing that defines Northway. Post-war construction — whether the original estate houses, the pre-fabricated homes that still stand in modified form, or the 1960s additions — shares certain characteristics: solid walls with little or no insulation, single-glazed or early double-glazed windows, draughty details at junctions and around services. EnerPHit provides a rigorous pathway to transforming that performance — upgraded insulation, airtightness detailing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — designed to work as a system rather than a collection of piecemeal improvements. I have lived in a home designed to Passivhaus standards, and the difference is tangible: the even warmth, the stillness, the sense that the building is working quietly in your favour.
PassivHaus Design takes those principles to their most rigorous conclusion for new construction, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating. Northway has seen proposals for significant growth, including the Carrant Garden neighbourhood which could bring up to five hundred new homes to land adjoining the village. New Build Design in this context must satisfy Tewkesbury Borough Council's planning requirements and the practical realities of building on the Severn Vale — drainage, ground conditions, orientation, and the relationship between new streets and existing community. Renovations offer a different kind of opportunity for the older properties that predate the post-war estate — buildings like Northway Court Farm, a Grade II listed manor farmhouse, or The Northway itself on Hardwick Bank Road, a Grade II listed building dated 1851, built in blue lias stone with ashlar quoins and a fishscale ceramic tile roof. These are buildings where care, knowledge and restraint matter more than speed. For sites in the open countryside beyond the village, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional new homes where standard development would not normally be permitted — but only where the design is genuinely outstanding and sensitive to its setting.
Northway grew from necessity — a factory, a camp, a community built when speed mattered more than craft. The homes that resulted are solid, practical and well-loved, and they deserve architecture that matches the care their owners put into them. Whether you are extending, retrofitting, or planning something new in this part of Gloucestershire, we would welcome the conversation.