When HS2 archaeologists excavated the old St Mary's Church in Stoke Mandeville, they found something beneath the Norman walls that nobody had expected — flint foundations forming a square structure, enclosed by a circular boundary ditch, with Roman roof tiles bedded into the mortar. An Anglo-Saxon church, built from whatever materials the land offered, sitting quietly beneath centuries of later construction. A Norman church grew above it during the twelfth century — the chancel arch dates to around 1170, its walls built from loose limestone rubble. A south aisle followed in the 1340s, a clerestory in the fifteenth century, a brick tower in the seventeenth. Each generation built on what the last had left, reusing, adapting, adding — and none of them knew quite how deep the foundations went. This is what draws me to Stoke Mandeville: the reminder that good building has always been an act of accumulation, each layer responding to what came before.
Award-winning Architects in Stoke Mandeville
Building Experience That Spans Old and New
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006. We are now based in Oxford, ARB registered and RIBA Chartered, working with clients across the country. Our Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, The Deerings, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 and served as a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. My membership of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — reflects a conviction that understanding existing fabric comes before proposing change, something that matters especially in a village where a seventeenth-century inn and a twenty-first-century housing estate may soon share the same parish.
Designing for a Village in Transition
Extension Design matters here more than in most villages, because the village core holds buildings that demand respect — the Woolpack Inn with its exposed timber framing in the gable end, the Thatched Cottage with its half-hipped roof and brick chimney — and any addition nearby must sit comfortably alongside that character. With around 2,480 new homes allocated to the parish under the Local Plan, many families in the older part of Stoke Mandeville would rather improve the home they have than move into a new estate. The village's emerging Neighbourhood Plan reinforces what the lanes and listed buildings already tell you: that Stoke Mandeville should remain a distinct place, not a suburb. We design extensions that bring light deeper into existing plans, open living spaces towards gardens and use materials that belong to the street they face, not to a catalogue. In a village where seventeenth-century timber frame meets twentieth-century brick meets the new-build estates arriving to the south, reading context accurately is not optional — it is the entire discipline.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in a parish absorbing 2,480 new homes the question of how those homes perform is not abstract — it is the difference between a development that ages well and one that becomes a liability within a generation. We approach every project with the principle that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. PassivHaus Design takes this to its most rigorous conclusion, creating homes with exceptionally low energy demand through precision-engineered airtightness, insulation and the elimination of thermal bridges. With development on this scale arriving south of the hospital and around Hawkslade, PassivHaus is the difference between growth that adds genuine value to the parish and growth that simply adds density.
New Build Design offers the chance to demonstrate what a home in Stoke Mandeville could be when designed from first principles rather than repeated from a standard type — oriented to its specific plot, responsive to the Vale of Aylesbury landscape, built to perform rather than merely comply. EnerPHit, our certified retrofit approach, addresses the older housing stock that gives the village its character: upgrading insulation, sealing the building envelope and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. For a seventeenth-century timber-framed cottage or a twentieth-century semi along the Risborough Road, EnerPHit delivers stable indoor temperatures and significantly lower energy bills while the building itself — the one the street has always known — remains unchanged from the outside.
Renovations are central to our work, and in a village where HS2 archaeologists found Roman materials reused in Saxon foundations, the principle of working with what already exists runs deep. Reading an existing building — understanding where lime mortars are needed, where earlier structures sit within later additions, where a light touch achieves more than wholesale change — is as important as any new design. For those with ambitions beyond the village boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes in open countryside, where the quality of architecture and its sensitivity to the surrounding landscape earns its place in the Vale of Aylesbury.
If you are extending a family home, planning a new build or renovating one of the listed buildings that give Stoke Mandeville its character, we would welcome the conversation. The archaeologists found Roman tiles in Saxon walls and Norman stone on top of both. Every good building starts by understanding what is already there.