There is something quietly compelling about a village that sits at a geological threshold. Shurdington lies where the Cotswold escarpment drops away to the Severn Vale, with Leckhampton Hill rising steeply to the east — its exposed limestone face a reminder that the stone beneath your feet is the same stone that built the village around you. I find this kind of direct relationship between landscape and architecture endlessly rewarding to work with. Poplar Farmhouse, dated 1661 with an inscribed sundial on its facade, and the Grade II* listed Church of St Paul with its elegant broach spire reaching to 110 feet, both draw on the same oolitic limestone tradition that the escarpment itself made possible. When the material story of a place is that legible, it shapes every design decision you make — from the colour of a new extension's render to the thermal strategy for a building whose walls have stood for centuries.
Award-winning Architects in Shurdington
Trusted Expertise Where Escarpment Meets Vale
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. A village like Shurdington — where listed buildings, post-war housing, and the Cotswolds National Landscape converge — demands architects who can move fluently between heritage sensitivity and contemporary design. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, with membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings grounding our approach to older structures. Our work on The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire, a Grade II listed restoration, and The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a certified Passivhaus that won the RIBA East Award in 2018, reflects the range we bring to every project. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year, and as members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, we treat energy performance and thoughtful design as inseparable rather than competing priorities.
How We Work with Homes in Shurdington
Extension Design is often the starting point for projects in a village like Shurdington, where the housing stock spans several centuries and styles. Along the older lanes near St Paul's Church, homes built from local Cotswold stone may have grown incrementally over generations — a rear wing added here, a lean-to there — and the challenge is to bring a new extension into conversation with what already exists without mimicking it. On the village's more recent edges, where mid-twentieth-century and later housing predominates, extensions offer the chance to introduce better-performing materials, more generous natural light, and a stronger connection between interior spaces and the landscape beyond. Tewkesbury Borough Council, which handles planning for Shurdington, will expect any extension within the Cotswolds National Landscape to demonstrate sensitivity to the wider setting, and that expectation aligns with how we prefer to work — designing outward from the site, not inward from a template.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is particularly well suited to the older stone-built homes in Shurdington. Buildings like Poplar Farmhouse and the properties around the churchyard have walls that have endured for centuries but offer limited thermal resistance by modern standards. The EnerPHit approach — careful airtightness detailing, high-performance glazing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — can transform their energy performance while preserving the external character that gives the village its identity. At the foot of an exposed escarpment, where winter winds roll down from Leckhampton Hill, the difference between a draughty stone house and a properly retrofitted one is not abstract — it is felt every day.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, but it takes on particular meaning in a landscape as valued as this. The Cotswolds National Landscape designation exists because of the relationship between geology, agriculture, and building traditions that has shaped this place over centuries. Designing sustainably here means working with that relationship — choosing materials that belong, orientating buildings to make the most of passive solar gain, reducing energy demand so that homes in Shurdington are not only kinder to the landscape but more comfortable, more economical to run, and more joyful to inhabit.
We also bring Renovations, PassivHaus Design, New Build Design, and Paragraph 84 expertise to projects in and around Shurdington. Renovations of the village's listed and older buildings require the same patient reading of a structure's history that informed our approach to The Great Barn. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route for exceptional new homes in the open countryside beyond the village boundary, and within the Cotswolds National Landscape the design bar is set appropriately high.
Shurdington is a village shaped by what lies beneath it and what rises behind it — the escarpment, the stone, the centuries of building that connect the two. If you are planning a project here, whether extending a family home, retrofitting an older property, or designing something new within this remarkable landscape, we would welcome the conversation.