There is a particular kind of place that fascinates me as an architect — one where you can stand on a street and feel the ghost of something completely different beneath it. Woodley is one of those places. Where families now walk to school along Mohawk Way and Hurricane Way, over six thousand aircraft were once built and tested on the grass of Woodley Aerodrome. Phillips and Powis Aircraft — later Miles Aircraft — operated from that airfield from the early 1930s, designing and manufacturing planes that trained RAF pilots through the Second World War. The airfield closed in the 1960s, and within a generation the runways became housing estates. The Museum of Berkshire Aviation on Bader Way is almost all that remains above ground. But the story of that transformation — from open farmland to airfield, from airfield to neighbourhood — tells you something important about how Woodley was built. Much of this town was made quickly, in response to demand, and the architecture reflects that urgency. The opportunity now is to bring those homes up to the standard their occupants deserve.
Award-winning Architects in Woodley
An Older Woodley, and Why It Matters
Before the aerodrome, before the post-war estates, Woodley had a quieter history that left its mark in the buildings that survive. The name itself comes from the Old English for a clearing in the wood, and the settlement appears in the Register of Saint Osmund from the late eleventh century as part of the ancient parish of Sonning. The Church of St John the Evangelist, built in 1873 to designs by Henry Woodyer — a pupil of William Butterfield and one of the finest Victorian church architects — is a handsome building in flint and stone, its Transitional style bridging Early English and Decorated Gothic. Then there is the story of Bulmershe Court, built in 1777 by James Wheble and later bought by Henry Addington, who served as Speaker of the House of Commons and then as Prime Minister from 1801 to 1804. King George III reviewed the Woodley Yeomanry on Bulmershe Heath in 1799. The house itself was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a teacher training college that eventually became part of the University of Reading, but the landscape it occupied — and the scale of ambition it represented — is part of what makes Woodley more than a suburb.
Renovations in Woodley demand an architect who can read what is there before deciding what comes next. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a deep interest in understanding historic structures on their own terms — their materials, their logic, the way they were made to work. Whether the project is a Victorian villa near the church or one of the older cottages along the roads that predate the airfield era, that attentiveness is essential. For the more typical housing stock in Woodley — the 1950s and 1960s semis, the later estates — Renovations take a different form, rethinking layout, light and flow to make homes that were designed for a different way of living work for the way people live now.
Bringing Post-War Homes into the Present
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through everything we do, and in Woodley it carries a particular practical weight. The town's housing stock is overwhelmingly post-war — built solidly enough, but to the thermal standards of their era, which in practice means draughty, hard to heat and expensive to run. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus retrofit standard, addresses these problems at the level of the building fabric itself. Insulation, airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery transform the thermal performance of a house without altering its appearance — the kind of intervention that makes a genuine, measurable difference to comfort and energy bills. We bring the expertise of Passivhaus Trust membership and accreditation through The Green Register to every retrofit, ensuring the design performs as predicted in the rooms where people actually live.
Extension Design is often the most practical route for families in Woodley who need more space but do not want to leave a neighbourhood they know. Planning applications go through Wokingham Borough Council, and understanding their policies on scale, materials and streetscape relationships is part of the work we do before pencil touches paper. The best extensions do not simply add square footage. They rethink how a home is used — how light moves through it, how the kitchen connects to the garden, how a family actually occupies its rooms. On the generous plots that characterise much of Woodley's mid-century housing, there is real scope to create something that transforms a home without losing what made the street worth living on.
PassivHaus Design takes sustainability to its highest technical standard — homes with exceptional thermal comfort, outstanding air quality and energy consumption so low it changes what a house can be. For New Build Design on infill plots or at the edges of the town, we design buildings that belong to their context while performing to standards the original houses could not have imagined. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 with a conviction that good architecture is the marriage of the poetic and the practical — homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and we work with clients across the country. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. In 2025, I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards — a recognition of the approach to design we have been developing for almost twenty years.
Beyond the Town Boundary
South of Woodley, the Loddon valley opens into farmland and the kind of landscape that rewards an architect who understands both ambition and restraint. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building an exceptional home in the open countryside, but the design must be truly outstanding and sensitive to its setting. With our Passivhaus expertise and environmental credentials, we have the technical and design capability to meet that bar — and the experience to know that exceptional architecture in a rural setting is not about making a statement but about making something that belongs.
Woodley is a town that was built in layers — farmland, airfield, neighbourhood — and each layer has left its mark on the place. Whether you are restoring one of the older buildings that predate the post-war boom, transforming a 1960s semi into something that performs like a modern home, extending to make room for how your family lives now, or building something new on the edges of the town, we would welcome the conversation.