Swindon has been reinvented before. In 1841 it was a small hilltop market town of fewer than 2,500 people, its Old Town core built in local stone with the quiet symmetry of Georgian facades and the winding lanes of a medieval layout beneath them. Then the Great Western Railway arrived, and within a generation Isambard Kingdom Brunel's decision to site the locomotive works here had created an entirely new settlement at the foot of the hill — planned streets of Bath stone cottages, a Mechanics' Institution at their heart, a workers' village so well conceived that it was voted England's favourite conservation area in 2018. That kind of transformation interests me as an architect because it raises a question every growing city has to answer: how do you build at scale without losing the care, the specificity, the sense of place that makes somewhere worth living in? Swindon answered it brilliantly in 1842. With thousands of new homes planned across the borough over the coming decades, the question is back — and this time the answer needs to include energy performance, material responsibility, and buildings that will still be valued in a hundred and eighty years.
Award-winning Architects in Swindon
Why Work with Gresford Architects in Swindon
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered Architect with membership of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust, and The Green Register — a combination that matters particularly in Swindon, where the city is managing rapid growth alongside heritage stewardship. Our practice won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings in 2018 and was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our work appears regularly in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. What drives everything we do is a conviction that sustainability and architectural quality are inseparable — that the best buildings for a city in motion are the ones designed to last, comfortable to inhabit, economical to run, and joyful to live in.
Architectural Services Shaped by a City in Motion
New Build Design is where the opportunity in Swindon is most immediate. The New Eastern Villages development will deliver around 8,000 homes on the eastern edge of the borough, with the first completions at Lotmead already underway. Wichelstowe, to the south, continues to expand with hundreds more homes in its next phase. Swindon Borough Council's emerging Local Plan to 2043 anticipates nearly 26,000 new homes across six strategic housing allocations — a scale of growth that demands design quality, not just volume. We have always believed that new homes should be specific to their place and their time: oriented for daylight, detailed for airtightness, built from materials chosen for performance and longevity rather than cheapness. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new-build energy performance, creating homes that need almost no conventional heating — a standard we have delivered and one that ought to be the baseline for any city building at this pace, not the exception.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through everything we do, and in Swindon it takes on a particular urgency. A city growing this fast has a responsibility to build well — not just for the people who will live in these homes but for the energy they will consume over their lifetimes, the materials embedded in their construction, the landscapes they will sit within. We approach every project with a commitment to reducing energy demand, selecting materials with low embodied carbon, and designing buildings that work with their environment rather than against it. That means thinking about orientation, natural ventilation, thermal mass, and the long-term performance of the building envelope from the very first sketch.
EnerPHit is our certified retrofit standard, and the historic housing stock that defines central Swindon makes it essential work. The GWR Railway Village — those Bath stone terraces Brunel commissioned from 1842 — is a conservation area and Heritage Action Zone where Historic England has been working alongside Swindon Borough Council since 2019 to restore and repair buildings that had been neglected for decades. Many of these Victorian and Edwardian terraces have solid walls, single-glazed windows, and heating systems that struggle to keep pace with modern comfort expectations. An EnerPHit retrofit takes a complete building envelope approach — appropriate insulation for the wall type, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, meticulous airtightness — that transforms both how a building feels to inhabit and its running costs. The technical detail matters, but so does heritage awareness. For listed buildings or conservation-area properties, we bring the understanding of traditional construction that SPAB membership and our conservation projects have taught us.
Extension Design in Swindon is shaped by the variety of the city's housing stock. A Victorian terrace in the Railway Village conservation area presents a completely different design challenge from a 1960s semi in Penhill or a modern detached home in the western suburbs, and the best extensions respond to what is already there — the materials, proportions, and spatial logic of the existing building — while bringing something new. Renovations to older homes in Swindon often uncover layers of alteration, and the skill is in knowing what to keep, what to strip away, and how to bring a building's performance up to contemporary standards without losing the character that makes it worth renovating in the first place. Swindon's Old Town conservation area, with its Georgian and early Victorian buildings, is a case in point — these are homes where care, knowledge of traditional construction, and a light touch matter more than bold gestures.
The rural fringes of Swindon — where the borough meets open Wiltshire countryside — offer a particular design opportunity under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework. The policy is not a shortcut to building anywhere; it is a recognition that in the right landscape, a building of exceptional design quality can be justified not by density but by merit. We have worked on rural sites where the entire planning case hinged on architectural excellence and landscape integration, and in settings like this, energy performance and design ambition become inseparable. A Paragraph 84 project on the edge of Swindon is a chance to demonstrate how growth, sensitivity to place, and sustainability can work as a single intention.
Swindon is a city that has always built with purpose — from the planned precision of the Railway Village to the scale of what is coming next. If you are considering a new home, an extension, a retrofit, or a project that asks something more ambitious of this landscape, we would be glad to talk it through. The best buildings in a city like this start with the understanding that growth and quality are not opposites — they are, at their best, the same thing.