Walk south along the Bristol Road through Quedgeley and you pass through seven centuries of building in a single mile. The Little Thatch, a fourteenth-century timber-framed house with its steeply pitched roof and close-studded oak frame, sits just a few minutes from the clean-lined estates of Kingsway, where thousands of homes have risen on the former RAF Quedgeley site since 2006. It is exactly the kind of layering that draws my attention as an architect — not just the contrast between old and new, but the question of what connects them, what each generation asked of its buildings and its materials. The medieval builders along this road chose local timber and thatch because that was what the Severn Vale provided. The question for anyone building or altering a home in Quedgeley today is whether we can bring that same attentiveness to place, that same honesty of construction, into the way we work now.
Award-winning Architects in Quedgeley
Why Homeowners in Quedgeley Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and the practice is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Our work sits at the intersection of heritage sensitivity and environmental performance — the marriage of the poetic and the practical, as I often describe it. That dual focus is particularly relevant in a place like Quedgeley, where a project might involve the careful adaptation of a timber-framed cottage one month and the sustainable redesign of a modern family home the next. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited with The Green Register. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. More recently, I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal — recognition that reflects a consistent commitment to design that is comfortable, built to last and as efficient as it can possibly be.
Architectural Services Shaped by Quedgeley's Character
Renovations in Quedgeley can mean something quite different depending on which part of the town you are in. Along the Bristol Road corridor, the older buildings — timber-framed structures like the Little Thatch, originally known as Queen Anne's Farm, and Forge Thatch Cottage — present the kind of challenges that demand both craft knowledge and structural understanding. Timber frames move, settle and breathe in ways that modern cavity walls do not, and any renovation needs to work with those characteristics rather than against them. At Manor Farm, where a medieval moated site surrounds a house with a fifteenth-century core, the architectural history runs even deeper. These are buildings that reward patience, careful survey work and a genuine respect for how they were put together. As a SPAB member, that respect is central to how we approach every alteration to a historic structure — understanding what is there before deciding what to change.
For the thousands of homes in Kingsway and the wider estates built from the mid-twentieth century onward, Extension Design is often the most immediate way to improve how a house works. The masterplan for Kingsway delivered more than three thousand homes on the former RAF base, and while the houses are well built for their era, many follow standard layouts that do not reflect how families use their space over time. A considered extension can open up the ground floor, connect living spaces to the garden, and bring natural light into the centre of the plan where it is most needed. Gloucester City Council handles planning applications for Quedgeley, and the relatively open planning context across much of the town — there is no conservation area designation covering the newer estates — means there is real scope to be ambitious with form, materials and orientation.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through everything we do, whether the project is a heritage renovation or a contemporary extension. It shapes how we specify materials, how we detail the junction between old fabric and new, how we think about orientation, daylight and thermal performance from the very first sketch. For homes in Quedgeley built in the 1990s and 2000s, EnerPHit — the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard — offers a route to dramatically improved comfort and reduced energy costs through upgraded insulation, airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The Bridge Keeper's House near Rea Bridge, a Greek Revival structure built around 1830 for the Gloucester and Berkeley Ship Canal, is a reminder that Quedgeley's architectural story includes more than just domestic buildings — and that each era leaves structures with distinct performance challenges that benefit from careful, informed intervention.
Where new homes are being considered, New Build Design allows us to design from first principles for the site, the client and the climate. PassivHaus Design takes this to its fullest expression — a home engineered to need almost no conventional heating, designed around its orientation, its occupants' patterns and the specific conditions of its plot. We have designed to this standard and lived in the results, so we understand the difference it makes not as theory but as daily experience. To the south and west of Quedgeley, where the Severn Vale opens into more rural landscape, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a pathway for an exceptional new home in a countryside setting, but only where the architecture demonstrates genuine quality and sensitivity to its surroundings.
If you are considering a project in Quedgeley — whether it involves breathing new life into a building with centuries of history or making a modern home work harder for the people inside it — we would welcome the conversation.