There is something quietly extraordinary about standing in Old Sarum and realising that the view from your kitchen window takes in five thousand years of building. The Iron Age hillfort rises to the west, its chalk ramparts still sharp against the sky, and somewhere beneath the turf lie the foundations of a Norman cathedral that was already old when it was abandoned in the thirteenth century. Yet the homes around you — the streets, the schools, the daily life of this community — are among the newest in Wiltshire, most of them built since 2008. That juxtaposition fascinates me as an architect: how do you give warmth and identity to homes where history operates on a scale that makes everything feel temporary? The answer lies not in imitating the past but in building with the same conviction — homes that are comfortable, efficient, and designed to last.
Award-winning Architects in Old Sarum
Why Homeowners in Old Sarum Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country — from heritage restorations to Passivhaus-certified new builds. My work in places like Old Sarum requires a particular flexibility: the ability to steward a Grade II listed barn in Buckinghamshire one month and design a performance-optimised new home the next. I am ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered, accredited by The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — a commitment that matters because Old Sarum, despite its youth as a settlement, sits within layers of deep heritage: the Iron Age ramparts, the Norman cathedral ruins, the Grade II* RFC hangars. I won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus project that proved sustainable homes can be genuinely joyful to live in. I was shortlisted for Sustainability Architect of the Year in 2018 and invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. That breadth of experience — knowing how to work within conservation constraints while designing forward-thinking homes — is exactly what Old Sarum needs as it grows.
Architectural Services for a Community Still Taking Shape
New Build Design is central to what Old Sarum needs. Around eight hundred homes were built on the north side of the Portway between 2008 and 2016, and from 2018 the Longhedge Village development added a further seven hundred and fifty homes to the north, accessed from the A345. With Bloor Homes proposing around three hundred more on land to the north-east and proposals for the airfield site potentially adding several hundred more, Old Sarum is a settlement still being written. That pace of growth creates both opportunity and risk — the chance to build homes that genuinely perform, and the risk of volume housing that ages poorly. We design new homes as individual responses to their site, their orientation, and the way their occupants actually live, drawing on Sustainable Design principles that reduce energy demand from the outset through careful orientation, high-performance fabric, and materials chosen for longevity as much as aesthetics.
Sustainable Design is not an optional layer in Old Sarum — it is the difference between homes that will still be comfortable and affordable to run in thirty years and homes that will not. The Tidings and other recent developments have begun to show this thinking: air source heat pumps and photovoltaic panels are becoming standard. But genuine sustainability goes deeper than equipment. It begins with how the building is oriented to the sun, how the fabric prevents heat loss before the heating system needs to work at all, and how materials are chosen to last decades rather than need replacement within ten years. Old Sarum's growth means an opportunity: new homes here can demonstrate that performance and comfort are not luxuries but standards. PassivHaus Design is the most rigorous framework for achieving this — buildings that maintain stable temperatures year-round while using almost no active heating. That level of resilience matters in communities where families will still be living in thirty years.
Extension Design is already becoming relevant as the earliest homes in Old Sarum reach fifteen years and families outgrow the layouts they bought into. Extending a relatively modern home is a different discipline from extending a stone cottage — the materials and proportions are contemporary, which means real freedom to rethink how space flows, bring in more natural light, and improve the thermal performance of the whole house. Wiltshire Council, as the planning authority, will assess extensions against the character of the area, and in Old Sarum that means working with the scale and palette of the existing developments rather than against them.
Among the newer housing, the airfield offers an unexpected layer of heritage. Three Grade II* listed hangars, built in 1918 with Belfast truss construction for the Royal Flying Corps, stand as some of the best-surviving examples of First World War aviation architecture in the country. Any development near these structures requires sensitivity to their setting — a challenge that sits comfortably within our experience of working beside listed buildings and within conservation constraints. Renovations to older properties in the wider Laverstock parish, where pockets of more traditional housing remain, call for the same care for existing fabric and an understanding of how older walls, roofs, and windows behave. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a rigorous pathway for improving the energy performance of these older homes without losing their character — an approach we have applied successfully on projects including The Old Orchard, an EnerPHit retrofit in Oxfordshire featured in The Modern House. Beyond Old Sarum's built-up area, the open chalk downland to the north and west falls under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework, where architecturally exceptional design is a condition of planning consent for new rural homes.
Old Sarum is a place where new communities are forming beside ancient ones. The homes being built here today will define the settlement's character for generations. If you are planning a project in Old Sarum, we would welcome the conversation.