October/November 2021
The UK's outdoor hospitality business magazine for function venues, glamping, festivals and outdoor events
The UK's outdoor hospitality business magazine for function venues, glamping, festivals and outdoor events
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GLAMPSITES<br />
CASE STUDY<br />
The Meadows<br />
at Polehanger<br />
Ready to launch – four brand new<br />
bespoke cabins in central Bedfordshire<br />
Charlotte and Andrew Foster are<br />
about to open their glampsite,<br />
part of a farm diversification to<br />
mitigate reduced revenue from<br />
farming activities. Their cleverly<br />
designed cabins are the result of<br />
hours of painstaking research and<br />
the couple are itching to welcome<br />
their first guests this December.<br />
We talk to Charlotte about tackling<br />
planning, interiors, homeschooling<br />
and more!<br />
What’s your back story – your life before<br />
glamping?<br />
My husband Andrew is the third generation<br />
of Fosters to run Polehanger Farm. Previously<br />
an award-winning dairy farm, it went arable<br />
in 1991 and now 122 hectares are contract<br />
farmed. We have eight hectares of Countryside<br />
Stewardship wildflower and winter bird food<br />
margins and 21 hectares of woodland, which is<br />
both private and publicly accessible. The farm<br />
also features 7km of public and permissive<br />
footpaths that connect three local parishes of<br />
Meppershall, Shefford and Campton.<br />
Andrew started learning the ropes of<br />
running the estate in 2017, working at the<br />
farm for several years alongside his job in IT<br />
consulting. He finally left his London job two<br />
weeks before lockdown in 2020.<br />
I trained and worked as a solicitor in<br />
London for several years before moving out<br />
to Bedfordshire more than 10 years ago with<br />
the hope of starting a family. This took longer<br />
than we had hoped, but after a round of IVF,<br />
we were lucky enough to have twins. I gave<br />
up work to look after them but when they<br />
started school in September 2019. I was ready<br />
for a new challenge and did not want to return<br />
to the legal world, so I joined Andrew at the<br />
farm and we started looking at diversification<br />
options.<br />
We held our own wedding reception at the<br />
farm in 2007 (as had Andrew’s parents in 1973),<br />
so we knew it would be perfect as a venue.<br />
When a feasibility study indicated that turning<br />
our barns into a purpose built wedding venue<br />
was prohibitive, we focused on planning an<br />
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