Walk into St Swithun's Church in Wickham and look up. Eight papier-mâché elephants' heads gaze down from the aisle roof — brought back from an exhibition in Paris by the patron William Nicholson, who liked them so much he had four more made to complete the set. It is a wonderfully eccentric detail in a building that is itself a study in how architecture absorbs and reuses what came before. The tower is Anglo-Saxon, probably eleventh century and quite possibly the oldest standing tower in Berkshire, and the Saxon builders set Roman balisters between the belfry windows, salvaged from the settlement that once stood here along Ermin Street. Benjamin Ferrey rebuilt the nave and aisles in Decorated Gothic between 1845 and 1849. At the nearby Wickham House — a Georgian rectory, now Grade II listed — a vinery was built from fifteenth-century windows and stonework salvaged from the ruins of St Gregory's Church at Welford. Every generation in Wickham has built with the materials of the one before. That instinct — to reuse, to adapt, to find new purpose in what already exists — is at the heart of how I think about architecture.
Award-winning Architects in Wickham
Heritage Expertise Rooted in Practical Sustainability
A village like Wickham, where a Grade II* listed church sits beside a Grade II listed house and the archaeology of two thousand years of settlement lies beneath your feet, needs an architect who understands heritage as something living rather than frozen. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes how we approach every project at Gresford Architects, whether it involves a listed building or not — it is a way of thinking about buildings as things that grow, change and accumulate meaning over time. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has deepened that instinct into something more rigorous. We founded the practice in London in 2006 and are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings in Hertfordshire won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. I am a RIBA chartered and ARB registered architect, accredited by The Green Register and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. Our work has appeared in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine — projects that share a conviction that sustainability and beauty are not competing priorities but the same thing.
Architecture Shaped by Wickham's Character
Renovations in Wickham demand the same sensitivity to material and context that the village itself demonstrates so well. The older buildings here — flint and brick, chalk and tile, the local materials of the North Wessex Downs — were constructed with an understanding of this landscape that modern interventions need to respect and extend. Working within a village where the historic fabric is so clearly layered means reading how a building was put together before proposing anything new. West Berkshire Council takes a careful approach to development in this part of the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, and rightly so. For homes in Wickham with heritage significance, Renovations are about understanding the building first and designing second.
Many of the homes built in Wickham during the twentieth century sit within that layered historic setting but were constructed to the thermal standards of their time — solid walls, single glazing, heating systems that work far harder than they should. EnerPHit offers a way to bring these homes into line with the landscape they sit in. The approach is certified and rigorous: detailed survey of the existing building, then targeted insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all designed around the specific construction rather than applied from a template. In a village where the Saxon builders of St Swithun's tower set Roman stone into new walls rather than discarding it, there is something fitting about a retrofit method that works with what already exists rather than starting again. Sustainable Design underpins every project we take on in Wickham, from the orientation and material palette of an Extension Design that opens a home towards the chalk downland, to the fabric-first engineering that makes PassivHaus and EnerPHit buildings so efficient to inhabit.
For homeowners in Wickham considering how their home connects to its setting, Extension Design can reshape that relationship entirely — bringing light into rooms that currently turn their backs on the downland, using flint, brick and timber detailing that reads as part of the village rather than applied to it. Where the older cottages here use materials drawn directly from the chalk geology beneath them, a good extension should feel like a continuation of that conversation between building and ground. New Build Design within the parish of Welford must satisfy West Berkshire Council's policies for the National Landscape, and rightly so — any new home along this stretch of the Downs needs to sit as carefully in the landscape as the settlement that has grown here since the Roman road brought the first travellers through. PassivHaus Design delivers homes that maintain stable internal temperatures year-round with almost no conventional heating, achieving the kind of environmental performance that a protected landscape demands. Beyond the settlement boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route for truly exceptional architecture in the open countryside — a home that responds to the chalk, the woodland and the deep archaeology of this ground with the same instinct for reuse and adaptation that Wickham has demonstrated for two thousand years.
Wickham is a village that has always known how to build with what it has — Roman stone, Saxon craft, Victorian ambition, and the quiet materials of the chalk country beneath it all. If you are considering a project here, whether that is a sensitive renovation, a retrofit that transforms how your home performs, or a new home within this remarkable landscape, we would welcome the conversation.