Henden is a reasonably rare estate given its compactness, its history, diversity and the fact that it is one hour away from London by car and train. It lies under the first ridge in from the North Downs of the Weald, lying in what was called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), which today is labelled National Landscape. It is fed water from a range of spring lines along this ridge.

We bought Henden in June 1997. Since that time our strategy has been based upon ensuring that when the time comes for us to leave Henden (probably feet first) it is in a better condition than when we bought it. At the same time, we have looked to make the estate financially sound on a stand-alone basis. For the first 11 years this was tough as we did not have sufficient financial resources to do what we wanted, but in 2007 an advisory company we owned, which was unrelated to Henden, was sold. This gave us the freedom to start doing what we wanted to do. Today, the focus remains on safeguarding the estate where its land and infrastructure are used as efficiently as possible, and the flora and fauna are allowed to grow in scale and diversity. Each day we remember that we are simply custodians of this historic estate, which has seen countless Governments rule this country, good and bad.

When we bought Henden the estate was the home of an established dairy farm. As noted elsewhere, we tried hard to make this operation work with the focus on staff and livestock safety and safeguarding the environment. We won awards for our work reflecting our mantra: “if you are going to do something, do it well”. In 2009/10, we expanded the operation by building new infrastructure, including livestock buildings and increasing the number of animals to close to 500. Sadly, even with this new investment the business rarely made a profit despite the high quality of the operation and the milk produced. Early in 2019, we closed the operation and looked after some beef cattle for a year. In 2020, we decided to redevelop the livestock buildings for use as high-quality storage facilities to store film & TV assets between filming and release. So far, this business has been successful, although there are a number of competing sites. We hear often from clients that many of these other storage sites are not of the same quality in terms of the facilities and flexible and friendly service that we offer, but we do not take this for granted. An interesting and important feature for our locals is that over a year vehicle traffic in and out of the estate is today more than 60% less than what it was when we had the dairy farm. Peace and quiet is good.

When we closed the dairy operations we reduced our staff numbers and ended up with two farm-houses being free, a cottage and an Oast House. In mid 2019, we converted them to Airbnb use, since when these properties have earned over 600 highly positive reviews (ratings 4.95/4.96 respectively).

Once we had closed the dairy business we used the arable land previously used to grow food for the livestock. to grow crops for sale into the market Today, on rotation we grow wheat, oats and beans. We also grow grass for harvesting and have put some fields into the Government’s SFI scheme to grow nectar-rich plants. This land totals a gross 358 acres, some 341 acres net when field margins are accounted.

To date, making money from the arable operation has continued to allude us, despite the best efforts of the contractors we have used together with our own team. The relatively small scale of Henden as compared with the larger commercial operations such as those in Norfolk together, the fact that everyone working in this business of ours are paid either salaries or contractor fees (i.e. unlike many farms where the owners work “for free”) put significant, continued pressures on margins. This is the same for all farmers to a greater or lesser degree reflecting the high costs of labour and materials used together with the increasingly challenging, uncertain and sometimes extreme weather conditions.

We could have decided to turn all our land over to mother nature, that is “re-wild” it, but have taken the view that it is vital farmers across the country do their best to grow what food they can for our country. Our politicians, of all Political colours, have consistently shown that they do not understand or value farming, reflecting their broad and deep ignorance of the importance of food quality and security. The three most important things for the lives of human beings are, in order, water, food and energy. Given our approach to life at Henden, we travel in hope that one day the political class will start to understand the priorities of the broader population they serve. Ideally, this will be without a war reminding us of how important “dig for victory” was, a programme instigated soon after the start of the Second World War to increase food production for the country. As of today, sadly we are not optimists on this front.

Reflecting the above, we have recently strengthened our contractor arrangements and are investing more capital in our land (mostly drainage), barns and equipment. The ambition is to make more money than we spend at the operating level, but even if we do not do so we will continue our arable operations for as long as we can afford to do so. It is a key part of Henden’s environment and in a very small way to our country.

The rest of the estate, which comprises grazing, amenity land together with some lovely woods, shaws and a range of ponds and two reservoirs, are well managed and peaceful. There are several rough areas for wildlife to hide in or rummage about and we have plenty of trails which we see the wildlife using by way of the several trail cameras that we have placed around the estate. Our woods are harvested as appropriate and the timber sold locally. Our aim is to continue to enhance these environments so that the flora and fauna activity that we have seen improve over the last few years continues to do so. We get immense pleasure, for instance, from seeing new species of birds, animals, butterflies and other bugs and critters as do those who walk the footpaths that cross our land. Many ramblers have made these observations to us. We have considered accelerating the programme of enhancement of some of our areas of land through using further Government grants and so on. For the most part, however, we have resisted this because in this day and age Government grants carry significant political risk: will a programme on offer today still be with us tomorrow? This is an important question given that improving land and the environment takes many years, many more than the life of a Government, even two to three Governments.

So to conclude, we remain committed owners of this reasonably sized, historic and attractive estate, which lies in the heart of the Garden of England. Like so many others, we have struggled to make farming pay. Along the way, however, we have been fortunate to diversify and today, with continued focus, hard work and good fortune we are confident that Henden will remain the attractive place that it is and will be in good health when the time comes, who knows when, to pass onto someone else.