Most Wiltshire towns grew from agriculture, from chalk and sheep and slow accumulation. Westbury made things. When railway construction in the 1840s uncovered high-grade iron ore north of the town, it set in motion an industrial chapter that would define the place for almost a century. The Great Western Iron Ore Smelting Company opened its ironworks behind the station in 1858, and at its peak four furnaces were running, with narrow-gauge locomotives hauling ore from the surrounding pits. The cloth trade had already been here for centuries — Abraham Laverton, mill owner and Liberal MP, was weaving at Angel Mill from 1849 — and his wealth gave the town one of its most striking buildings: the Laverton Institute, opened in 1873, designed by William Stent in a Venetian Gothic that seems almost improbable for a small Wiltshire market town. Red brick with Bath stone dressing, generous proportions, built to educate and to last. That instinct — to invest seriously in the fabric of a place — is what draws me to Westbury. The ironworks closed in 1933, the mills fell quiet, but the buildings they left behind still speak to a town that expected quality from its architecture.
Award-winning Architects in Westbury
A Practice Built on the Same Principles
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Westbury's combination of industrial heritage, a well-defined conservation area, and substantial planned growth is exactly the kind of place where our experience counts. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire that demonstrates how energy performance and architectural ambition reinforce each other. The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. I judged the British Homes Awards in 2025. I am ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered, a member of SPAB and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited by The Green Register. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, Grand Designs Magazine, and the RIBA Journal. What connects all of it is a belief that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — the same principles that Abraham Laverton applied to the Laverton Institute, even if the technology has moved on.
Designing for Westbury
Renovations in Westbury often mean working with buildings that carry their industrial and commercial history in their structure. The conservation area around the town centre holds roughly twenty listed buildings, including the Grade I listed All Saints Church — a cruciform building with a central tower whose origins reach back to Saxon times, substantially rebuilt in the 1430s when the clerestory, three chapels, and most of the tower were added. T. H. Wyatt's 1847 restoration renewed the nave roof and introduced a large west window. Around the church, the streets hold a mix of Georgian frontages, Victorian commercial premises, and the red-brick civic confidence of the Laverton Institute. Renovating in this context means reading the building honestly: understanding its materials, its structure, its place in the streetscape. Our membership of SPAB shapes every renovation we take on — honest repair over speculative restoration, respect for what is there, and the confidence to bring older buildings into genuinely comfortable, energy-efficient use without erasing what makes them worth keeping.
New Build Design is central to the next chapter in Westbury. The emerging Wiltshire Local Plan identifies a requirement for around 710 additional homes in the town up to 2036, and major allocations are already moving forward, including plans for up to 350 homes on land west of Mane Way. The Westbury Neighbourhood Plan, made in March 2024, sets the community's expectations for what that growth should look like. When we design new homes — whether on allocated sites or individual plots — the question is always what this place needs, not what could be dropped in anywhere. In Westbury, that means responding to a materials palette shaped by local geology: the greensand and limestone that give the older buildings their solidity and warmth. Sustainable Design is not an add-on; it is the starting point. Passive solar orientation, airtight construction, materials chosen for longevity and low embodied carbon. Homes that are comfortable to live in and economical to run from the day they are occupied.
Extension Design in Westbury works across a housing stock that reflects the town's layered history. A Victorian terrace near the station presents different opportunities and constraints from a 1970s detached house on the southern edges. Within the conservation area, Wiltshire Council rightly holds extensions to high standards of material and design quality. Outside it, there is more freedom — but freedom without thought produces poor buildings. We approach every extension with the same discipline: how does this addition improve the house as a whole? How does it sit with its neighbours? How does it perform thermally? An extension is an opportunity to transform how a home works — to bring daylight into a dark kitchen, to connect a living space to a garden, to add the room a family needs without losing what the house already does well.
PassivHaus Design brings new homes in Westbury to a standard of comfort and efficiency that conventional construction cannot match. Superinsulated walls, airtight envelopes, triple-glazed windows, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery create homes that need almost no conventional heating — even through a Wiltshire winter. It is a standard we have built to and lived in ourselves, and the results are measurable: stable internal temperatures, negligible energy bills, and air quality that is consistently better than in traditionally ventilated homes. EnerPHit applies the same rigour to existing buildings. The solid-walled properties around the conservation area — stone and rubble construction, often draughty and expensive to heat — are exactly where EnerPHit makes the greatest difference. Internal insulation detailed for breathable construction, high-performance glazing, and airtight junctions transform the experience of living in an older home while leaving the external character that the conservation area protects entirely intact.
To the east and south of Westbury, the landscape lifts towards the chalk escarpment where the White Horse has overlooked the town since at least the late seventeenth century. Bratton Down, the Iron Age hillfort above it, and the open downland of Salisbury Plain create a setting where the relationship between building and landscape is everything. For homes in these rural positions, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for genuinely exceptional residential design — where the quality of the architecture itself justifies the development. These projects demand a deep understanding of topography, materials, and light. We approach them with the conviction that the best rural buildings do not compete with their setting but belong to it.
Westbury is a town that has always built with purpose — from the ironworks and the cloth mills to the Venetian Gothic of the Laverton Institute and the ancient solidity of All Saints. If you are considering a new home, an extension, a renovation, or a retrofit in or around the town, we would welcome the conversation. The best buildings are the ones that take their place seriously.