Every building in Shippon carries the mark of an institution. Abingdon Abbey held the manor from before the Domesday Book until the Dissolution in 1538. The Duchy of Cornwall took it from there and still owns much of the land today. Then came the RAF, which opened its airfield on the western edge of the village in 1932 and shaped Shippon's identity for sixty years. Now the barracks site is earmarked for approximately 2,750 new homes — a Garden Village-scale development that will transform the parish of St Helen Without more profoundly than anything since the airfield was first laid out. What interests me about Shippon is that question of scale and continuity: how do you bring thousands of new homes into a village that has been small, quietly held, and agricultural for most of its history, without losing the qualities that made it a coherent place? That is fundamentally an architectural question, and it is the kind of challenge we think about constantly at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Shippon
Trusted Architects Working Near Shippon
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and the practice is now based at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead — well placed to work across the Vale of White Horse and the villages around Abingdon. What Shippon faces is different from most places we work: a moment of genuine transformation at scale. That kind of change demands an architect who understands both new construction and the existing fabric it must sit alongside. The Deerings, our Passivhaus new build in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018 — a project that proved high-performance homes can be warm, distinctive, and rooted in their setting rather than imposed upon it. The Old Orchard, our EnerPHit retrofit in Oxfordshire, was featured in The Modern House Journal and The Spaces for achieving the same thing in reverse: bringing a period home to modern thermal standards without stripping away its character. I am RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited by The Green Register. In 2025 I judged the British Homes Awards, and in 2018 I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. These are not decorations — they reflect a consistent way of working that puts sustainability, craft, and the identity of a place at the centre of every project.
Design Services for a Village in Transition
New Build Design in Shippon is about far more than putting houses on a plan. Vale of White Horse District Council handles planning here, and the North Wessex Downs National Landscape rises to the south — a designation that carries real weight in any application for development in this area. The Dalton Barracks site, allocated in the Joint Local Plan, is designed to follow Garden Village principles: a comprehensive, sustainable, mixed-use community rather than a conventional housing estate. That ambition demands architecture that takes Sustainable Design seriously from the outset, embedding low-energy performance, natural materials, and thoughtful orientation into every home rather than treating sustainability as an afterthought. It means understanding the relationship between the new development and the existing village — the scale of the older buildings along the road, the openness of the surrounding farmland, the way the airfield's flat expanse meets the gentler landscape beyond. PassivHaus Design is particularly relevant when building at this scale — it offers a framework for performance that does not diminish with volume: stable temperatures, excellent air quality, minimal energy bills across every property. A Passivhaus home is not a technical demonstration. It is warm, light-filled, responsive to its setting, and the kind of place people actually want to live in, which is the whole point when you are building at Garden Village scale.
For homeowners already in Shippon, the existing housing stock presents its own opportunities. Extension Design can transform a mid-century or post-war home — opening it to daylight, improving its connection to the garden, adding the space a family needs without losing the proportions that make the original building work. EnerPHit provides a rigorous methodology for deep energy retrofits of older homes, improving thermal performance through targeted insulation, airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The village's older buildings, including George Gilbert Scott's Church of St Mary Magdalene consecrated in 1855, reflect a tradition of careful craft that Renovations should honour rather than erase. And for the rural land surrounding Shippon — the fields and paddocks that frame the village beyond the barracks boundary — Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional new homes in the open countryside where the architecture truly justifies its place in the landscape.
Shippon is a village that has always been shaped by forces larger than itself — the abbey, the Crown, the airfield. The next chapter, with its thousands of new homes, will be the most dramatic yet. Whether you are part of that transformation or caring for a home already here, we would welcome the conversation about what good architecture can do for this place.