Buildings outlive the industries that build them. Uley was once one of the busiest cloth-making villages in the Stroud valleys, famous for its Uley Blue — a deeply dyed broadcloth used in military uniforms — and home to mills that employed hundreds of people. When coal replaced water power and the trade moved north, the weaving stopped, but the buildings remained: the mill structures, the weavers' cottages, the merchants' houses, the church that served a parish far larger and wealthier than the quiet village you find today. That persistence of fabric beyond purpose is something I think about often as an architect. The stone walls along Uley's main street, the valley setting beneath the Cotswold escarpment, the way the village green still anchors the settlement — these things were not designed to be picturesque. They were built to be useful, and they endure because they were built well. Architecture that lasts begins with that same instinct: materials chosen honestly, structures designed for the long term, buildings that serve the people who live in them.
Award-winning Architects in Uley
Why Homeowners in Uley Choose Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our base in Oxford. Our membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes how we approach villages like Uley, where the conservation area — designated in 1988 — protects a streetscape that has evolved over centuries. We are RIBA chartered, accredited with The Green Register, and members of the Passivhaus Trust, which means our work sits at the intersection of heritage sensitivity and contemporary performance. Our project The Deerings in Hertfordshire won the RIBA East Award in 2018 — a Passivhaus home that proved rigorous energy standards and architectural quality are not competing ambitions. I was shortlisted as Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year, and in 2025 I judged the British Homes Awards. For homeowners in Uley, that combination of conservation knowledge and sustainability expertise matters, because so many of the buildings here demand both.
How We Work with Homes in Uley
Sustainable Design is at the heart of what we do, and in Uley it connects to a building tradition that was always rooted in what the valley could provide. The Cotswold limestone that forms the escarpment above the village is the same stone that built its houses, its church, and its mill walls. The yew trees that gave the settlement its name — Uley likely derives from a Saxon term for a clearing in a yew wood — drew on the same geology and soil. Our approach to Sustainable Design continues that relationship between building and place, using contemporary science to ensure that homes in Uley perform as well as they possibly can while respecting the materials and proportions that give the village its character. Uley sits within the Cotswolds National Landscape, and that designation reinforces what the stone and the valley already say: this is a place where new work must belong.
Extension Design in Uley requires particular care. The village has seventy-one listed buildings — a remarkable concentration for a settlement of just over a thousand people — and Stroud District Council, as the planning authority, will expect any addition to respect the established character of the conservation area. Many of the cottages along the main street were built for workers in the cloth trade, with modest footprints that do not always suit modern life. We design extensions that read as natural continuations of what already exists, working with local stone and sympathetic proportions, while creating the space that families need. The key is understanding the building you are extending: its age, its construction, its relationship to its neighbours and to the street. An extension to a former weaver's cottage is not the same proposition as one to a Georgian merchant's house, and the design should reflect that difference.
EnerPHit offers a proven framework for upgrading the thermal performance of older homes without altering the external appearance that the conservation area protects. Many of the stone cottages in Uley have thick walls that feel substantial but provide surprisingly poor insulation, with heat escaping through roof junctions, window reveals, and uninsulated floors. EnerPHit addresses this systematically — improving airtightness, introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and adding internal insulation where it can be accommodated without compromising historic features. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter, and cheaper to run, while looking exactly as it should from the street. Renovations in Uley demand an understanding of layered construction — many buildings here have medieval cores behind later facades, and our SPAB training ensures we treat each layer with care rather than stripping a building back to a single period.
PassivHaus Design sets the standard for new-build energy performance, and for anyone planning a home from the ground up in or around Uley, it ensures comfort and minimal running costs from day one. New Build Design within the village or on any allocated sites needs to be architecture that belongs to this valley, drawing on local materials and the modest scale of the existing streetscape. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes in the open countryside, and the landscape around Uley offers extraordinary settings — from the slopes below Uley Bury, the Iron Age hillfort that overlooks the village as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, to the wooded combes and field edges where the escarpment meets the vale. This is country that rewards architecture designed with ambition and sensitivity in equal measure.
Uley has reinvented itself quietly — from Saxon clearing to medieval wool settlement, from the boom years of Uley Blue to the stillness that followed when the mills fell silent. If you are considering a project here, whether it is extending a listed cottage, improving the energy performance of a stone house, or building something new in this remarkable valley, we would welcome the conversation.