Walk along Fore Street in Trowbridge and you encounter something remarkable — a sequence of eighteenth-century clothier houses so grand that Nikolaus Pevsner described them as a "stretch of palaces." These are not aristocratic mansions or civic monuments. They are the homes of wool merchants, built from Bath stone with the confidence of people who understood that architecture is how wealth becomes permanent. The cloth trade made Trowbridge the foremost centre of woollen production in the south-west of England, earning it the title "The Manchester of the West," and that prosperity left its mark in stone, in the proportions of rooms, in the quality of joinery and plasterwork. What interests me as an architect is what happens to a town like this when the industry that built it moves on. The last mill closed in 1982. The buildings remain, and the question they pose — how to honour what was made while making something new — is one of the most compelling in architecture.
Award-winning Architects in Trowbridge
Why Homeowners in Trowbridge Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Trowbridge is a town where industrial heritage, conservation sensitivity, and the pressures of new growth all converge, and that combination calls for a practice comfortable working across those registers. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered Architect, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust, and The Green Register — qualifications that mean we bring conservation knowledge and energy performance expertise to every project. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a 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. Our work has appeared in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine. What unites it all is a conviction that architecture should be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — while still being joyful to live in.
Designing for a Town Built on Cloth and Stone
Renovations in Trowbridge mean engaging with a building stock shaped by centuries of the cloth trade. The grandest houses along Fore Street — those Bath stone facades that so impressed Pevsner — often conceal earlier sixteenth- and seventeenth-century structures behind their elegant Georgian fronts, timber frames and older masonry hidden beneath later refinement. Understanding what lies behind the facade is essential before any intervention begins. In the Newtown conservation area, the character shifts: predominantly Victorian housing with Bath stone front elevations and red brick to the sides and rear, a material hierarchy that tells you exactly how the original builders thought about presentation and economy. Working on homes in Trowbridge within these areas means collaborating with Wiltshire Council's conservation officers to ensure that alterations respect the specific character each neighbourhood has developed over time. Our SPAB membership shapes our approach — honest repair, respect for original fabric, and the confidence to intervene where doing so genuinely improves how a building works for the people living in it.
EnerPHit offers a rigorous, certified route to transforming the thermal performance of older homes, and in Trowbridge the need is clear. Much of the town's housing stock — from the solid-walled Georgian and Victorian properties in the town centre and Newtown to the former industrial buildings adapted for residential use — predates any meaningful standard of insulation or airtightness. An EnerPHit retrofit addresses the entire building envelope: carefully specified insulation appropriate to the wall construction, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, upgraded windows, and meticulous attention to eliminating draughts. For a listed clothier house on Fore Street, this work must be invisible from the street — the transformation is internal, in the warmth and stillness of rooms that once cost a fortune to heat. For the Victorian terraces in Newtown, the possibilities are broader, but the principle is the same: making buildings more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and more durable for the long term.
New Build Design is increasingly relevant in Trowbridge as the town grows to meet significant housing targets. Wiltshire Council's Local Plan identifies a requirement of around 5,830 new homes for the Trowbridge area over the period to 2036, with major allocations already progressing on the town's edges. New homes arriving in a place with this depth of architectural character carry a particular responsibility — they should contribute to the town rather than dilute it. We design new homes that respond to their site, their orientation, and the materials and proportions of their surroundings, built to meet the highest standards of energy performance from day one. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark: superinsulation, airtight construction, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, achieving homes that need almost no conventional heating. It is a standard we have delivered, and for a town adding thousands of new homes it represents the kind of ambition that Trowbridge's original builders would have recognised — building the best you can with the knowledge you have.
Extension Design in Trowbridge responds to the particular character of the town's housing. The clothier houses and Georgian terraces of the centre present different challenges to the Victorian and Edwardian properties further out, and both differ again from the post-war estates that expanded the town through the twentieth century. In the conservation areas, any extension must demonstrate to Wiltshire Council that it respects the established streetscape and materials palette — Bath stone, red brick, slate. Beyond the conservation boundaries, the conversation shifts, but the principle holds: the best extensions grow from what is already there, completing a building rather than contradicting it. Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, from the earliest sketch to the final detail. We think about orientation, natural light, thermal mass, material selection, and the long-term performance of the building envelope as fundamental design decisions, not afterthoughts. In Trowbridge, where the cloth merchants built with materials chosen to last centuries, that instinct for permanence and quality feels particularly apt.
For sites in the open Wiltshire countryside beyond the town, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional homes in rural settings — a recognition that outstanding architectural quality and sensitivity to landscape can justify development where standard policy would not. The rolling farmland and river valleys around Trowbridge are landscapes where design ambition and environmental performance become inseparable.
Trowbridge was built by people who believed that how you make something matters as much as what you make. If you are considering a renovation, an extension, a retrofit, or a new home in or around the town, we would welcome the conversation. The best architecture starts with understanding a place, and this is a place worth understanding well.