STORY
Kent Legacy cont...
BIDDENDEN VINEYARDS- THIRD-GENERATION VINEYARD, WINERY AND CIDER PRODUCER biddendenvineyards. com
Kent’ s modern wine story began not with a grand château, but with an orchard farmer listening to the radio. In the late 1960s, falling apple prices were squeezing the Barnes family’ s 40-acre farm when Joyce Barnes heard a Woman’ s Hour feature about English vineyards being replanted. At a time when English wine was still a curiosity, the family responded by putting one-third of an acre under vines in 1969 and bottling its first wine three years later.
That small experiment has become Kent’ s original commercial vineyard, with 23 south-facing acres, 12 grape varieties and production of around 80,000 bottles a year. The second and third Barnes generations still grow, pick, press, ferment and bottle on the estate, keeping control of quality, character and the customer relationship rather than supplying fruit for somebody else’ s product. Apples were not discarded when wine became the future; they found a new role in ciders and juices. Biddenden’ s story is one of reinvention without waste, proving that a struggling crop, a useful idea and the nerve to act on it can reshape an entire family business.
LODDINGTON FARM AND OWLET FRUIT JUICE- FIFTH-GENERATION REGENERATIVE FRUIT FARM AND JUICE PRODUCER loddingtonfarm. co. uk / owletfruitjuice. co. uk
Some of the best business ideas begin with something nobody else wants. In 1979, Loddington Farm employee Colin Corfield was eating beneath a pear tree when he noticed fallen fruit spoiling around him and wondered why it could not become juice. That thought became Owlet Fruit Juice, which returned to its birthplace in 2020 when fifth-generation farmer James Smith bought the business.
Bringing Owlet home was part of a wider rethink about who should capture the value created by the farm. Years spent growing uniform supermarket fruit had shown James that strong crops could still be left unpicked when labour costs, weather damage or appearance standards made harvesting uneconomic. He began rebuilding the business around soil health, cutting chemical inputs, removing herbicides and synthetic fertiliser from much of the land, and using livestock and biodiversity to restore it. Owlet gives imperfect fruit a valuable second destination, while pressing, bottling and labelling on site allows Loddington to sell under its own name. The result is a family farm reclaiming control over its product, its margins and the future of its soil.
STONEHAM KITCHENS- FIFTH-GENERATION BESPOKE KITCHEN MANUFACTURER stoneham-kitchens. co. uk
Stoneham began in 1864 with William Hone Stoneham turning ladder rungs, mangle rollers, balustrades and wheelbarrow hubs in a Deptford basement. Its enduring skill, however, has been recognising what people need from timber at a particular moment and adapting the business without losing the craftsmanship beneath it.
During the Second World War, a largely female workforce kept the factory moving as production switched to hospital beds, ammunition boxes and balsa-wood nose cones for Mosquito aircraft. Peace brought another opportunity- the freestanding Cambridge kitchen unit sold in its thousands, manufacturing moved to Sidcup in 1959 and fitted kitchens followed. Later, when discount retail and mass production threatened to flatten the market, Stoneham chose specialist showrooms and bespoke manufacture rather than joining the race to the bottom. Today, around 70 people work from its 65,000-square-foot Kent factory, supplying more than 35 appointed showrooms, while Royal Warrants from Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III underline the quality of its work. Here, five generations have survived by preserving the craft, not the product.
196 • www. insidekent. co. uk