Most villages gather around something — a green, a crossroads, a river crossing. The City does not. This small hamlet in the parish of Radnage sits on the highest ground in the Chiltern Hills above the valley, and the buildings here feel as though they have been placed by people who valued the view and the wind in equal measure. Seventeenth-century brick and timber cottages line the ridge, their materials drawn from what the Chilterns could offer: chalk for lime, timber from the beechwoods, brick fired from the local clay. The wider parish is scattered across the hillside in clusters — The City, Town End, Green End, Bennett End — each separated by fields and connected by lanes that climb and drop through steep, quiet valleys. It is one of those places where every building feels like a considered response to the slope it sits on, the weather it faces and the ground beneath it. That kind of relationship between architecture and landscape is what draws me to a place.
Award-winning Architects in The City
Why Clients Across the Chilterns Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from our studio in Oxford with clients across the country. Our work in the Chilterns draws on nearly two decades of experience designing homes that are comfortable to inhabit, economical to run and more joyful to live in. We earned a RIBA East Award for The Deerings, our Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and were shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. As a RIBA chartered and ARB registered practice, members of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited with The Green Register, we bring the technical depth and heritage understanding that working in a landscape as sensitive as the Chilterns demands.
Architectural Services for The City and the Radnage Valley
The brick and timber cottages of The City were built by people who understood their materials intimately but had no concept of thermal performance as we know it today. A timber-framed cottage on an exposed ridge behaves differently from one sheltered in a valley — the wind finds every gap, every joint, every place where the frame has shifted over three centuries. Renovations to buildings like these demand an architect who reads the structure before reaching for a drawing board: how the timber moves with the seasons, where the lime mortar is doing its job and where it has failed, whether the brickwork can accept additional load or needs careful consolidation first. My membership of SPAB shapes every project we take on involving historic fabric. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus retrofit standard, is particularly well suited to these ridge-top cottages because it addresses the root cause of discomfort — poor airtightness, inadequate insulation, uncontrolled ventilation — through careful, building-specific detailing rather than generic solutions. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter, far cheaper to heat and dramatically better to live in, without losing the character that made it worth saving.
Radnage sits entirely within the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Buckinghamshire Council assesses every planning application here against that designation. The question is always the same: does this proposal conserve and enhance the landscape? For a hamlet as exposed and visually prominent as The City — where buildings on the ridge are visible across the valley — the answer has to be convincing. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional new homes in the surrounding countryside, but the standard is deliberately exacting. New Build Design under Paragraph 84 must be truly outstanding in quality and sensitive to its setting, and in a landscape of beechwood, chalk grassland and the distinctive brick-and-flint vernacular of the Chilterns, that means a building which belongs to the hillside rather than merely sitting on it.
Extension Design in The City is shaped by isolation rather than proximity. Unlike a village where buildings face each other across a street or green, the cottages here sit individually along the ridge, each one a standalone composition against the sky. An extension must respect that solitude — taking its scale from the original building, using brick, timber or flint that belong to the Chilterns palette, and reading the slope so that the new work settles into the hillside rather than fighting it. Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in a place where builders have worked with local materials for centuries, designing homes that use energy and resources as efficiently as possible feels less like a modern ambition and more like a continuation of an old instinct. PassivHaus Design takes that principle to its highest expression, achieving consistent indoor comfort and exceptional air quality through the fabric of the building itself.
The City is a place where buildings have been shaped by the Chiltern landscape for centuries — by its chalk, its timber, its contours and its weather. If you are considering a project here, whether restoring a seventeenth-century cottage, extending a family home or building something new in this remarkable setting, we would welcome the conversation.