Walk along Watling Street in Towcester and you are following a line that has been a road for the better part of two thousand years. The Romans built their garrison town of Lactodurum here, and while the fortifications are long gone, the instinct to build on this same ground has never stopped. What strikes me as an architect is the material conversation that runs through the town — the brown ironstone and pale limestone that appear together in building after building, from the ninety-foot Perpendicular tower of St Lawrence's Church, rebuilt in the 1480s with ironstone banded by limestone courses, to the fifteenth-century Chantry House on Watling Street East, where coursed squared ironstone sits alongside limestone under a slate roof. These are not decorative choices. They are the product of geology, of two different stones quarried within reach of the same builders, and the result is a palette that gives Towcester a warmth and texture quite distinct from the uniform limestone towns further west or the red brick settlements to the east. It is the kind of place where an architect has to listen carefully to the materials before picking up a pencil.
Award-winning Architects in Towcester
An Architect's Practice Built on Craft and Conservation
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. A town like Towcester — where the conservation area protects a streetscape of ironstone and limestone buildings that have been adapted and extended across centuries — is exactly the kind of context that draws on everything we know. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and my training at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow instilled in me a deep respect for how materials, light and place shape each other. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings informs every project involving historic fabric, because SPAB teaches you to understand a building's evolution before proposing anything new. That patience was essential to The Great Barn, a Grade II listed barn restoration in Buckinghamshire, where we had to read the structure carefully before adding anything new. In 2018, The Deerings — our certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire — won the RIBA East Award. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. The recognition confirmed something I have always believed: that comfort, durability and environmental responsibility don't compete — they sit together as naturally as the ironstone and limestone that make Towcester whole. More recently, as a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards, I saw the best homes share that same conviction: they were beautiful, they performed brilliantly, and they belonged to their places.
Architecture Shaped by Towcester's Character
Renovations in the conservation area demand a particular understanding of what makes these buildings work. The properties along Watling Street — many of them seventeenth and eighteenth-century, refronted in brick over earlier timber frames — are not museum pieces. They have been shops, inns, schools and homes, sometimes all in the same building across different centuries. The Chantry House itself began as a residence for the priests of Archdeacon Sponne's chantry, became a grammar school after the Reformation, and has been a private house since the 1860s. Renovating buildings with this kind of layered history means understanding which changes are significant and which can be improved upon — where an earlier alteration has compromised the structure or where a nineteenth-century refronting has become part of the character in its own right. West Northamptonshire Council manages planning for Towcester, and any work within the conservation area requires engagement with their conservation officers. Our experience with listed buildings and sensitive historic contexts gives us the confidence to navigate that process thoroughly, proposing changes that improve how a home functions while respecting the material and spatial qualities that make it worth keeping.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is particularly relevant to properties in Towcester's conservation area. The ironstone and limestone walls that give the town its character are handsome and durable, but they were built before insulation was invented. Cold winters, draughty rooms, damp where modern cement render or impermeable paint has trapped moisture inside — these are the problems that EnerPHit solves. The method is methodical: breathable insulation that works with the stone rather than sealing it off, airtightness improvements, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and windows that can be specified to sit inside the original frames or match the profiles of the Georgian and Victorian sashes still found on Watling Street. The result is a home that becomes genuinely warm for the first time in a century, quiet and comfortable through the year, without losing the warmth of its ironstone or ceasing to read as part of the street. We saw the same success with The Old Orchard, an EnerPHit retrofit in Oxfordshire, where the owners inherited an equally solid-walled building and didn't want to lose its character in the process of making it liveable. The principles that worked there work just as well in Towcester.
New Build Design carries real significance in Towcester given the scale of growth the town is absorbing. Over four hundred homes have been approved near Wood Burcote on the southern edge, with Barratt and Persimmon delivering the first phases, and early plans for a much larger expansion south of Towcester Racecourse could see several thousand additional homes in the coming decades. Growth on this scale is an opportunity to do things properly from the outset — orientation for passive solar gain, insulation and airtightness to standards that will still make sense in thirty years, materials that connect new buildings to the ironstone and limestone tradition rather than defaulting to generic brick-and-render. Sustainable Design runs through every new build project we undertake, because sustainability is the starting point, not an add-on — it shapes every decision about form, fabric, and how a building meets its site.
PassivHaus Design takes these principles to their most rigorous conclusion — homes that need almost no active heating because fabric, windows and ventilation work as a single, precisely calibrated system. The Deerings proved that a certified Passivhaus home can be warm, light-filled and architecturally distinctive. For homeowners in Towcester building on new plots, PassivHaus offers the chance to create something that performs at the highest level while responding to the character of its setting. Extension Design is equally important for those staying in the town centre, where many properties along Watling Street and the side streets have the depth and plot size to accommodate a well-considered rear extension that opens the ground floor to daylight and garden without disrupting the streetscape. For those building in the open countryside around Towcester — the gentle farmland and hedgerow landscape of the upper Tove valley — Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a rigorous but rewarding path to a new home where the design must earn its place in the landscape through genuine quality and careful attention to how it sits with the fields and settlements around it.
Towcester has been a place where people build, adapt and rebuild for longer than almost anywhere in Northamptonshire. That continuity — from Lactodurum's Roman walls to the ironstone tower of St Lawrence's to the new homes rising on the southern edge of town — is what makes working here so compelling. Whether you are renovating a stone-built property in the conservation area, improving the comfort of a home whose walls have stood for centuries, or building something new that earns its place alongside them, we would welcome the conversation.