Woolhampton is a village that has been shaped, quite literally, by what passes through it. The Bath Road brought the coaching inns — The Angel still stands on the main road, a reminder of the time when travellers between Reading and Newbury stopped here to rest and change horses. The Kennet Navigation, engineered by John Hore of Newbury between 1718 and 1723, cut a working waterway through the parish, and Woolhampton Lock remains part of the Kennet and Avon Canal to this day. Then in 1903, Benedictine monks expelled from Douai in France arrived at Upper Woolhampton and began building what would become Douai Abbey, its church designed by J. Arnold Crush and not fully completed until 1993. Each generation has added something to this place — not by replacing what came before, but by building alongside it. That idea, of new work sitting honestly beside older fabric, is something I think about on every project. It is central to how we practise at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Woolhampton
Why We Work This Way
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am a RIBA chartered and ARB registered architect, accredited by The Green Register and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. My background in conservation — I am a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — informs everything we do, whether a project involves a listed building or a mid-century family home that simply deserves better. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings 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. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. These are not credentials we list for the sake of it — they reflect the way we work: rigorously, sustainably, and with genuine care for both the buildings and the people who live in them.
Working with Homes in Woolhampton
The building stock in Woolhampton tells its own story. There are older brick and timber houses along the village lanes, the flint-and-Bath-stone fabric of St Peter's Church rebuilt by John Johnson in the late 1850s, and the seventeenth-century Grade II* listed Woolhampton House — now home to Elstree School — sitting in its parkland above the valley. Renovations in a village like this require an architect who understands materials as well as planning policy. Flint, brick, timber, stone — they each behave differently, age differently, and ask for different things when a building is brought back into full use or adapted for modern life. West Berkshire Council, as the local planning authority, takes a considered approach to development in the parish, and we welcome that. Good architecture benefits from careful oversight.
Sustainable Design runs through all of our work, and in Woolhampton it finds a natural home. The Kennet Valley is ecologically sensitive — the River Kennet itself is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, valued for its chalk stream habitats and the rare species they support. Designing sustainably here means thinking beyond the building envelope to consider how a project sits within its wider landscape: surface water management, material sourcing, energy performance, the relationship between a home and the ground it stands on. PassivHaus Design takes that thinking to its most rigorous conclusion, delivering homes that maintain stable, comfortable temperatures year-round with minimal mechanical heating. For homeowners in Woolhampton living in older properties that were never designed for thermal efficiency, EnerPHit offers a certified retrofit pathway — a systematic upgrade of insulation, airtightness and ventilation that transforms comfort and running costs without erasing the character of the original building.
Extension Design in Woolhampton often involves navigating the relationship between a house and its setting along the canal corridor or the Bath Road. The best extensions here are the ones that read the existing building carefully — picking up on proportions, materials, roof pitches — and then add something that is clearly of its own time. We are not interested in pastiche; we are interested in architecture that earns its place. New Build Design, where sites allow, should meet that same standard, responding to the scale and grain of the village rather than importing forms from elsewhere. And beyond the built-up area, in the open countryside that stretches toward Midgham and Brimpton, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional new homes — architecture that justifies its place in the landscape through genuine quality of design.
Woolhampton has been absorbing new building for centuries, from the coaching inns of the Bath Road to the Gothic ambition of Douai Abbey. If you are considering a project here — a renovation that brings an older home into the present, an extension that opens up the way you live, or a new home that belongs in this valley — we would welcome the conversation.