There is a moment inside St Peter's Church in Raunds that stays with you. High on the northern nave wall, a set of fifteenth-century paintings — the Seven Deadly Sins, the Three Quick and the Three Dead, St Christopher carrying the Christ Child — look down with the same quiet authority they possessed six hundred years ago. For centuries they were invisible, sealed beneath lime putty during the Reformation, only uncovered when George Gilbert Scott restored the church in 1874. I think about that whenever I visit a town like Raunds, where layers of history sit just below the surface waiting to be read. The ironstone buildings around the old centre, the former boot and shoe factories that once gave the town its livelihood, the new estates now spreading across land where those factories stood — each layer tells you something about how this place works and what it needs next. As an architect, reading those layers is where every project begins.
Award-winning Architects in Raunds
Trusted Expertise for a Town in Transition
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006, and from the beginning the practice has been drawn to places where different eras sit alongside one another and the architecture has to be thoughtful enough to hold them together. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA-chartered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited by The Green Register — credentials that reflect a conviction that conservation and sustainability are not competing priorities but two sides of the same principle. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard demonstrated that solid-walled buildings can be made genuinely comfortable without losing their character. The work we do reaches from heritage-sensitive renovation to certified low-energy new builds, and that range is exactly what a town like Raunds — growing rapidly while still shaped by its ironstone core and industrial past — asks of its architects. We work with clients across the country, bringing the same care to every project regardless of where it sits on the map.
Architectural Services for Raunds and the Nene Valley
New Build Design is where much of the current opportunity in Raunds lies. The town is absorbing significant growth — around four hundred homes are proposed on land west of London Road alone, alongside other sites that have come forward in recent years — and for anyone building individually rather than buying from a volume housebuilder, the chance to do things properly from the outset is real. Orientation for passive solar gain, fabric performance that will still make sense in thirty years, and a materials palette that acknowledges the ironstone and limestone of the Nene Valley rather than defaulting to a specification that could belong anywhere. Sustainable Design is embedded in every new build we undertake, because getting the envelope, glazing and ventilation right at the design stage is not a luxury — it is the most practical decision a homeowner can make, producing a home that is more comfortable to inhabit and more economical to run. In a town absorbing this scale of growth, getting the fabric right from the start means the house will still perform well in thirty years, regardless of how energy costs or the Nene Valley's climate shift around it. North Northamptonshire Council manages planning for Raunds, and the town's made neighbourhood plan adds a further layer of local policy that any proposal needs to navigate thoughtfully.
Renovations carry a particular resonance in Raunds, where the boot and shoe industry left a physical imprint that is still legible in the streetscape. The factories and workshops that once produced army boots — the same trade that prompted the famous 1905 march to London, when a hundred and fifteen Raunds bootmakers walked to the capital to protest War Office wages — have largely gone, many demolished and replaced by housing. But the older residential buildings that served the industry remain: solid-walled ironstone cottages around the town centre, Victorian terraces built for workers, and the older stone structures around Berrister Place and the church. Renovating these buildings means understanding their construction — thick ironstone walls that are breathable and durable but thermally inefficient by modern standards, timber floors and roofs that may have been altered repeatedly over a century or more — and finding ways to improve comfort and performance without stripping away the qualities that make them worth keeping. My membership of SPAB has taught me to read a building's history before proposing anything new, and that discipline matters in a town where each generation has added its own chapter.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous route to genuine thermal performance for the solid-walled housing stock in Raunds. Breathable internal insulation, airtightness improvements, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and high-performance windows can transform how an ironstone cottage or a Victorian terrace feels to live in — warm in winter, cool in summer, free of the draughts and damp that untreated solid walls so often produce. Extension Design is equally relevant to the terraces and larger houses in Raunds, many of which have the rear plot depth to accommodate a well-planned ground-floor extension that opens up the back of the house, connects kitchen to garden, and introduces daylight where the original plan was narrow and inward-facing.
PassivHaus Design takes the principles of Sustainable Design to their most exacting standard, producing homes that need almost no active heating because the fabric, windows and ventilation work as a single calibrated system. For those looking beyond the town into the open countryside of the Nene Valley, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a demanding but rewarding path to a new home in the landscape — one where the design must demonstrate genuine architectural quality to justify its rural setting.
Raunds has always been a town that makes things — boots, shoes, livelihoods — and that practical, making spirit is something I recognise and respect. Whether you are building new on the expanding edge of town, renovating an ironstone cottage in the older centre, or extending a home to suit how your family lives now, we would welcome the conversation.