There is a church tower in Swindon Village that has six unequal sides. The hexagonal west tower of St Lawrence is one of only two six-sided church towers in Gloucestershire — the other stands at Ozleworth, south of Dursley — and its Norman origins date the tower to around 1100, though the church itself was largely rebuilt in 1845 by the architect Thomas Fulljames. It is an extraordinary piece of building: not quite symmetrical, not quite regular, constructed by Norman masons who chose to do something almost nobody else was doing. That willingness to depart from convention, to let the building respond to its own logic rather than follow a pattern, is what catches my eye as an architect. Swindon Village sits on the northern edge of Cheltenham, a place where centuries of quiet, purposeful building are now meeting one of the largest planned expansions in the borough's history. The conversation between what has been carefully made here and what is coming next will be won or lost on architectural decisions — how we extend the homes already standing, what quality we insist on in the thousands of new ones planned, and whether the next generation of building here understands what made the village worth preserving.
Award-winning Architects in Swindon Village
Why Homeowners in Swindon Village Trust Gresford
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and we now work with clients across the country from our Oxford studio. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and my membership of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — shapes how we approach every project involving historic fabric, from a Grade II listed manor house to a village cottage that predates its neighbours by two hundred years. That training matters in a conservation area like Swindon Village, where Cheltenham Borough Council requires heritage impact assessments that demonstrate genuine understanding of a building's significance. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, reflecting our conviction that sustainability is not a constraint but an opportunity — to create homes that are more comfortable, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in. Our RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, and our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire show that heritage sensitivity and high performance are not opposing ambitions. I was shortlisted as Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and served as a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House, and Grand Designs Magazine.
Architectural Services for Homes in Swindon Village
Extension Design in Swindon Village starts with the question the conservation area's thirteen listed buildings keep answering: how does a building grow without losing what made it worth keeping? Swindon Manor — a mid-sixteenth-century timber frame that was expanded through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before conversion into six dwellings — is the village's own case study in careful adaptation, each phase responding to need while the original structure held its ground. An extension to a home here must follow that same principle: contemporary in spirit, grounded in the materials and proportions that Cheltenham Borough Council's conservation officers will expect to see reflected in a heritage impact assessment. We design extensions that earn their place beside what already stands, and our experience restoring the Grade II listed Great Barn in Buckinghamshire has given us a deep understanding of what listed building consent and conservation area applications require.
The North West Cheltenham Strategic Allocation will bring approximately 4,285 new homes to the fields directly around Swindon Village — a scale of growth that dwarfs everything built here since the medieval settlement took shape around St Lawrence. That concentration of development beside a conservation core means New Build Design carries weight it rarely does elsewhere: what emerges will define the village's edge for generations, and the gap between a thoughtful new home and a generic one is the gap between a place that still makes sense and one that has been swallowed. PassivHaus Design offers the highest certified standard of comfort and energy performance for new homes, and Sustainable Design is the principle that ties both approaches together — buildings that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, that are comfortable, designed to last, and that belong where they are built rather than ignoring what surrounds them.
Swindon Hall — with its late seventeenth-century core, substantially rebuilt and extended around 1845-50 before subdivision into four dwellings in 1949 — tells a story that repeats across the village's older stock: buildings adapted pragmatically over centuries, their original thermal logic long since overwhelmed by modern heating demands. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, was designed for exactly this situation. It means analysing how heat escapes through the solid walls and timber frames that define Swindon Village's conservation area, specifying insulation that respects how moisture moves through older construction, and achieving measurable airtightness improvements that transform comfort and running costs without compromising the building's character. Renovations here follow the same principle: understanding what a building was designed to do before proposing how it might work better, whether that means opening up a cramped layout within a listed structure or rethinking how a Victorian addition connects to its Georgian host. For sites in the countryside beyond the village boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional new homes where design quality justifies departure from normal restrictions — a demanding standard, but one that rewards the kind of architectural ambition that has shaped this place since Norman masons built a six-sided tower and decided convention was optional.
Whether you are extending a home beside Swindon Manor, considering what a new build on Cheltenham's expanding northern edge should look and perform like, or bringing one of the village's seventeenth-century buildings up to the thermal standards its original builders could never have imagined, we would welcome the chance to discuss your project in Swindon Village.