What I find architecturally revealing about West Haddon is the way you can read its social history through its buildings. The village sits on a ridge between the valleys of the Nene and the Avon, and until the enclosure of 1765 the surrounding land was farmed on the medieval open-field system — strips, commons, shared ground. When enclosure came, it came violently: a football match was used as cover for a mob that tore down the new fences and burned them. The landscape was remade nonetheless, and with it the village. New farmhouses were built out on the hedged fields, smallholders sold up, and what had been a farming community reorganised itself around different kinds of work and different kinds of homes. Walk through West Haddon today and you can see the evidence — traditional three-bay stone farmhouses alongside tradesmen's dwellings in brick, labourers' cottages in local stone, and a rare few built in cob, each material reflecting the means of its original owner and the fashions of its time. It is a village whose buildings tell you who lived here and when, and for an architect that is a story worth reading carefully.
Award-winning Architects in West Haddon
An Architect's Practice for Heritage and Performance
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006. We are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country, and our practice sits at the point where heritage care and environmental performance meet. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered architect, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018 — the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for a RIBA South Award, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In a village like West Haddon, with thirty-two listed buildings and a housing stock that spans stone, brick and cob, that range of experience — from conservation-led renovation to certified low-energy new build — is not a luxury but a practical necessity.
Working With West Haddon's Layered Housing Stock
Renovations in West Haddon require an architect who can read the building in front of them and understand its construction before proposing any change. The Grade I listed Church of All Saints, built from coursed lias and limestone with ashlar dressings, dates from the twelfth to the fourteenth century with later seventeenth-century alterations, and its south porch carries a datestone of 1682. That material palette — lias and limestone — runs through much of the older village, but it is not the whole story. Some of the finest houses use brick, others combine stone and brick in a single elevation, and a handful survive in cob — an earth-and-straw construction technique that is rare in Northamptonshire and demands its own conservation approach entirely. West Northamptonshire Council handles planning for the parish, and with thirty-two listed buildings in West Haddon the expectations for any intervention are high. Through my membership of SPAB, I approach these buildings with the understanding that each material has its own behaviour — how it breathes, how it ages, how it responds to moisture — and the architect's job is to work with that behaviour, not against it.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is well suited to the range of construction in West Haddon. The stone-built properties along the older lanes require vapour-open insulation systems that respect the moisture dynamics of solid masonry. The brick-built houses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present different challenges — often with thin solid walls or early cavities that were never insulated. And the post-war housing that arrived as the village grew offers the most straightforward gains: cavity wall insulation, airtightness detailing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and high-performance glazing that together can transform a house from expensive to heat into one that is warm, quiet and efficient all year round. The principle behind all of it is the same — understand the fabric you are working with and improve its performance without damaging what makes it work.
Extension Design in West Haddon means navigating a village where no single material or period dominates. An extension to a stone farmhouse near the High Street needs to respect the proportions and palette of the existing building — the coursed stone, the slate or stone-slate roof, the modest window openings that characterise the older properties. An extension to a later brick-built house offers more flexibility but the same design discipline: new work that feels considered and complete, not simply bolted on for the sake of extra space. The best extensions make the whole building feel more resolved, and in a village with West Haddon's visual variety that means paying close attention to what the existing house is doing before deciding what to add.
Sustainable Design underpins everything we do, and in West Haddon it connects to the idea that buildings should be made to last — the same conviction that led those post-enclosure builders to use local stone and honest construction, even when fashion was pushing toward brick. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new-build energy performance, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating through careful orientation, superinsulation and airtight construction. New Build Design within the village must sit comfortably alongside the listed buildings and the established character of the streetscape. For sites in the open countryside around West Haddon, where the ridge-and-furrow patterns of the old open fields are still visible in places, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to architecturally outstanding homes — but the design must earn its place in a landscape that carries real historical weight.
West Haddon is a village shaped by a single dramatic change — the enclosure that remade its landscape and rebuilt its housing in a generation. If you are considering a project here, whether renovating, extending, retrofitting or building new, we would welcome the conversation.