The tithe barn at Manor Farm in Upper Heyford is one of those buildings that stops you thinking about architecture as fashion and makes you think about it as engineering. Nine bays of coursed rubble and ashlar, raised-cruck trusses spanning twenty-four feet, a Stonesfield slate roof that has kept the weather out for over six hundred years. New College, Oxford commissioned it around 1400, and whoever drew up the design understood something fundamental: that a building made honestly, from the right materials and with real structural ambition, does not just survive — it earns its place across centuries. That is the principle I come back to with every project at Gresford Architects, and Upper Heyford is a place where it feels especially alive. The village sits within the Rousham Conservation Area beside the River Cherwell, its older buildings shaped by the same limestone geology that produced the barn, and just to its south lies the former RAF Upper Heyford — a Cold War airbase now being reimagined as Heyford Park, one of the largest new communities in Oxfordshire. Few villages anywhere in England sit at such a striking intersection of deep heritage and large-scale reinvention.
Award-winning Architects in Upper Heyford
Trusted Expertise for Sensitive Settings
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead. I am RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. Our work has been recognised with a RIBA East Award for The Deerings in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal, and in 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. That combination of conservation knowledge and low-energy design expertise is directly relevant in Upper Heyford, where the Rousham Conservation Area places specific requirements on how buildings are altered, extended and maintained, and where the scale of development at Heyford Park demands architecture that is thoughtful about materials, energy and long-term value.
From Conservation Village to New Community
Planning applications in Upper Heyford are handled by Cherwell District Council, with the Rousham Conservation Area appraisal setting out the character and significance that any proposals need to respect. The village itself holds a Grade I listed tithe barn — also a scheduled monument — alongside the Grade II* listed Church of St Mary, whose Perpendicular Gothic west tower dates from the fifteenth century. Working with buildings of this calibre requires genuine understanding of historic fabric, and Renovations here are never simply cosmetic. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has deepened our respect for how materials age, how structures settle, and how each generation of alteration becomes part of a building's story. For the older stone cottages and farmhouses in the village, EnerPHit offers a certified pathway to dramatically better thermal performance — improved insulation, careful airtightness detailing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — without compromising the character that conservation area designation is there to protect.
For homeowners in Upper Heyford looking to make the most of an existing property, Extension Design can open up the compact footprints typical of village houses, bringing in natural light and creating spaces that connect more generously with their gardens. Sustainable Design shapes every extension we plan — orientation, material selection, the relationship between indoor and outdoor space — so that the result is not merely bigger but genuinely better to live in. These are homes rooted in a landscape of limestone and slate, and extensions that understand that material palette sit more comfortably in the streetscape than those that ignore it.
The transformation of the former RAF Upper Heyford into Heyford Park is one of the most ambitious residential developments in the country. The entire airbase is itself a conservation area, its Cold War structures recognised as scheduled monuments of national importance, and the masterplan for up to nine thousand homes will reshape this part of Oxfordshire over the coming decades. For anyone building new — whether on allocated land within the Heyford Park masterplan or on smaller sites within the parish — New Build Design and PassivHaus Design give us the tools to create homes that are comfortable, economical to run and built to last. PassivHaus in particular delivers the kind of fabric-first performance that justifies the investment: homes that stay warm in winter and cool in summer with minimal energy input, designed around the way families actually live. For sites in the open countryside around Upper Heyford, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional rural homes whose quality and sensitivity to their setting earn their place in the landscape.
Upper Heyford is a village defined by buildings that were made to endure — from a medieval barn commissioned by scholars to Cold War shelters built to withstand the unthinkable. If you are planning a project here, whether that means caring for one of the village's older buildings or creating something new that belongs in this extraordinary setting, we would welcome the conversation.