Walk along Church Street in Tewkesbury and the buildings tell you exactly how they were made. Timber frames stand exposed, jetties overhang the pavement, and carved doorways mark entrances to houses that have been continuously occupied since the fifteenth century. The Abbey Cottages — that long terrace running from number 34 to 50 — are a remarkable survival, more than twenty timber-framed dwellings standing shoulder to shoulder, their oak structures still doing the job they were built to do. Then you lift your gaze and there is the Abbey itself, Norman in scale and ambition, its crossing tower one of the largest Romanesque towers in England, built from Caen stone shipped from Normandy and floated up the Severn. What strikes me about Tewkesbury is this honesty of construction — timber, stone, brick, each material visible and legible, each era adding its layer without erasing the one before. It is the kind of place that rewards an architect who pays attention to how things are put together, not just how they look.
Award-winning Architects in Tewkesbury
Why Homeowners in Tewkesbury Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. What two decades of practice have taught me is that heritage and energy performance are not separate challenges — they are two faces of the same problem. A medieval timber frame needs to breathe, but it also needs to keep the people inside it warm. The external character of a building like those on Church Street may be protected, but the interior can be transformed if you understand the construction well enough. That convergence of constraint and opportunity is what drew me to specialise in conservation-sensitive design alongside Passivhaus-level energy performance, and it is precisely the combination that a town like Tewkesbury demands.
We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, and were shortlisted for the RIBA South Award for The Old Water Tower — two projects that demonstrate how far you can push thermal performance without compromising architectural quality. I was named a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018, and in 2025 served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings grounds every heritage project in the principles of careful repair and honest alteration — principles that matter acutely when you are working with Tewkesbury's timber-framed buildings, where the wrong intervention can cause damage that takes generations to undo. We are accredited through the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal.
How We Work With the Architecture of Tewkesbury
Renovations in Tewkesbury are as much about understanding construction as they are about design. The town's medieval timber-framed buildings — many of them along Church Street, the High Street, and the narrow alleyways that run between the main roads and the rivers — have survived because their builders understood the relationship between frame, infill and movement. Oak frames flex; lime plaster breathes; pegged joints allow for settlement over centuries. Introducing modern services, improved insulation or reconfigured layouts into these buildings requires the same respect for that logic. You cannot treat a timber frame as you would a masonry wall, and you cannot seal a building that was designed to breathe. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes every decision we make in this context, from the lime mortars we specify to the way we approach structural repairs. Tewkesbury Borough Council is the planning authority here, and their conservation officers are closely involved with proposals affecting the town's conservation area, so any scheme needs to demonstrate a genuine understanding of how these buildings work from the very first conversation.
Extension Design in Tewkesbury is shaped by the town's distinctive medieval plot pattern — long, narrow burgage plots running back from the street frontage, with the alleyways between them providing access to the land behind. Extending a property on one of these plots means working within tight boundaries and often designing to the rear, where an addition can open up living space without disrupting the street frontage that gives Tewkesbury its character. In the more recent housing beyond the historic core, the constraints differ but the principle holds: an extension should feel like a natural evolution of the building, not something imposed from outside. Whether the challenge is adding a contemporary kitchen to a Georgian townhouse with a brick front masking an older timber frame, or opening up the ground floor of a twentieth-century semi, the design must be specific to the building it serves.
EnerPHit is the service I believe will transform how people in Tewkesbury experience their older homes. The Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard addresses the fundamental problem shared by the town's listed buildings and its post-war housing alike: poor thermal performance that drives up energy bills and diminishes daily comfort. In a conservation setting, where external alterations are often restricted, EnerPHit works from the inside — upgrading insulation, improving airtightness, installing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — so that the building performs as a co-ordinated system while its external character remains untouched. Tewkesbury's relationship with water adds another dimension to any retrofit here. The town sits at the confluence of the Severn and the Avon, and flooding has shaped its architecture for centuries. Any renovation or retrofit must consider moisture management alongside thermal performance, ensuring that improvements to airtightness do not compromise the building's ability to dry out when it needs to.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, from material specification to the orientation of a room to capture light and warmth. It is not a constraint — it is an opportunity to create homes that are kinder to the planet and far more comfortable to live in. New Build Design applies these principles from first sketch, and for anyone commissioning a new home in or around Tewkesbury, the chance is to create something that responds to its setting with the same care the medieval builders showed when they chose oak and lime for their frames and infill. PassivHaus Design takes that ambition to its logical conclusion, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating and offer a fundamentally different quality of comfort and quiet. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building an exceptional home in the open countryside surrounding the town, where the Severn Vale opens out towards the Cotswold escarpment — a setting that demands architecture of genuine quality to justify its place in the landscape.
Tewkesbury has been shaped by the skill of its builders and the presence of its rivers for the better part of a thousand years. If you are considering a renovation to one of the town's historic properties, an extension that works with the grain of a medieval plot, or a new home that takes energy performance as seriously as it takes design, we would welcome the chance to talk it through with you.