Wantage has always been a town that makes things. Walk through the Market Place today — past the statue of King Alfred, past the timber-framed frontages along Newbury Street, past the Bear Hotel with its seventeenth-century coaching arch still intact — and you are walking through a place whose physical fabric tells a story of craft and commerce stretching back centuries. The leather workers and tanners who drove the town's prosperity in the seventeenth century are long gone, but the buildings they left behind are not. Georgian facades built on the profits of trade. Timber-framed houses in the Market Place with herringbone brick panels dating to the early 1600s. The Church of St Peter and St Paul, rebuilt and refined over successive centuries, anchoring the town centre with a quiet authority. Wantage wears its history openly, and that history is written in materials — stone, timber, brick, tile — laid down by people who understood their craft.
That heritage sits at the heart of one of the most significant periods of growth the town has seen. Thousands of new homes are being built on the former airfield between Wantage and Grove, and the local plan allocates further expansion. It is a moment that will reshape this part of Oxfordshire, and it demands architecture that rises to the occasion — design that performs, that belongs, that lasts.
Why We Work in Wantage
Gresford Architects is based in Oxford, and I have worked across the Vale of White Horse for years. I founded the practice in London in 2006 and we later moved to our current studio at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead — a small, focused practice where every project is led by me personally. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, accredited with The Green Register, and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. That spread of expertise is not accidental. It reflects a belief that the best architecture treats heritage and performance as two sides of the same discipline, not competing priorities.
Our project The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018. The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for a RIBA South Award in 2016. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. We bring this depth to every project in Wantage, whether it is a listed building in the conservation area or a new home on the edge of the North Wessex Downs.
Working Within the Conservation Area
The Wantage Town Centre Conservation Area contains ninety-eight listed buildings — a remarkable concentration for a town of this size. The character is varied and layered: seventeenth-century timber-framed buildings with exposed framing and brick infill panels sit alongside Georgian brick frontages, Victorian shopfronts, and the occasional medieval survivor. Materials shift from block to block — coursed rubble limestone on one street, rendered brick on the next, timber framing exposed or concealed depending on the century and the fashion. Understanding that variety is essential to working well here, because there is no single template for what a building in Wantage should look like. Every intervention needs to respond to its immediate neighbours and to the broader patterns of the street.
Renovations in the conservation area call for exactly this kind of close reading. A historic timber-framed house on Mill Street presents different structural and moisture challenges from a Georgian brick townhouse on Grove Street, even though both are listed, both are in the same conservation area, and both might need broadly similar things — better thermal comfort, a more functional kitchen, a bathroom that works for modern life. Our SPAB training and heritage experience mean we approach each building on its own terms. How does the structure move? Where does moisture travel? What original fabric survives, and what has been altered over the years? These questions shape every decision, and they are the difference between a renovation that honours a building and one that simply changes it.
Extension Design in Wantage often begins with a conversation about what a home is missing — more light, a better connection to the garden, a ground floor that flows rather than compartmentalises. The conservation area means materials, scale, and design will rightly be scrutinised, and that rigour is something we welcome. Constraints sharpen design. A well-placed extension on a period property in Wantage can transform how the whole house works without competing with the character of the original building.
New Homes That Earn Their Place
Wantage is growing. The development at Crabhill and the Wellington Gate site on the former airfield between Wantage and Grove are bringing thousands of new homes to the area, and the town's relationship with its landscape — the chalk downs rising to the south, the flat vale stretching north — is being tested by that growth. New Build Design in this context carries a responsibility beyond the individual plot. How does a new home sit within the wider settlement? Does it draw on the materials and proportions that give Wantage its character, or does it default to the generic? Does it perform as well as it should — thermally, structurally, environmentally — for the decades ahead?
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through everything we do, and in a town set against the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, it is not abstract. It means homes that are comfortable, built to last, and designed to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. PassivHaus Design takes that ambition to its most rigorous expression — a certified standard that delivers around ninety per cent less heating energy than a conventional new build, achieved through meticulous attention to insulation, airtightness, thermal bridge-free construction, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. Our project The Deerings, a RIBA award-winning certified Passivhaus, is proof of what that standard delivers in daily life — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a home that is warm, quiet, and extraordinarily cheap to run.
For sites in the open countryside south of Wantage — where the chalk downland rises towards the Ridgeway and the character of the landscape demands something exceptional — Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to building outside the settlement boundary. It is a deliberately high bar: the design must be truly outstanding, must reflect the highest standards of architecture, and must significantly enhance its immediate setting. But for the right site and the right client, it is an opportunity to create something remarkable in one of Oxfordshire's most beautiful landscapes.
And for the many existing homes in Wantage built in the twentieth century — the interwar housing, the post-war estates, the 1960s and 1970s developments — EnerPHit offers a different kind of transformation. The certified retrofit standard treats a house as a complete thermal system, upgrading insulation, airtightness, and ventilation to bring performance as close to Passivhaus levels as the existing structure allows. For homeowners in Wantage paying to heat a draughty mid-century house through winter, the result is not marginal. It is a step change in comfort, running costs, and carbon footprint.
Wantage is a town that understands craft — it always has been. Whether you are restoring a listed building in the conservation area, extending a family home, building something new on the edge of this growing town, or making an existing house warm and efficient for the long term, I would welcome the conversation.
