Astley Castle

Astley is a remote site with rich historic resonance: a moated castle, lake, church and the ghost of pleasure gardens. The castle was gutted by fire thirty years ago, with large sections of wall collapsed and decay accelerating. The ruins were too expensive to restore, and too valuable in heritage terms to abandon.

Our solution was simultaneously pragmatic and poetic: we proposed to build the new house within the oldest part of the castle, and to retain wings from the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as walled external courts, maintaining the open character of the ruin rather than attempting to recreate its completeness. The layout of the house is inverted: living quarters on the first floor, bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor. The accommodation occupies approximately half the footprint of the ruins (263m2 of 613 m2) but new construction extends over the courts to tie, buttress and weather the retained fragments. Old walls are capped and edged in new lime mortar brick diaphragm walls, the full depth of the originals.

We improved energy efficiency without prejudicing the character of the Listed building, using highly insulated, thermally massive new construction and reclaiming material from demolitions. The masonry and carpentry are simple, economical and contemporary, yet they would be recognisable to the earlier builders of Astley. Every room is a dialogue of construction across the centuries. Recent architectural practice in historic settings has tended to be polarised between two positions: studious repair and reconstruction, or completely contrasting construction, 'placing the past in inverted commas'. By contrast, our design for Astley engages directly and confidently with the accumulation of historic structures. The approach we have developed here shows how we should make our cities.