Through foresight and teamwork, the Cotswold estate of Miserden has been transformed from a pretty but isolated rural village to a fully connected, sustainable community.
To all outward appearances, the beautiful village of Miserden in Gloucestershire, with its 17th-century manor house, pretty stone cottages and unspoiled countryside, hasn’t changed in decades. But in the past year, this quiet corner of the Cotswolds has undergone a series of significant changes that have brought it firmly into the 21st century.
Comprising around 2,900 acres in the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the Miserden Estate has been owned by the Wills family since 1913. Its business centres on an in-hand farming operation, along with residential and commercial property – with some 80 let properties in and around the village. ‘The estate has always been built with a strong ethos of contributing to the community, and sustainable agriculture and practices – while keeping an eye on the future,’ says Nicholas Wills, who is in the process of taking over its management from his father.
Rather than allowing the village to become a dormitory for people working in the nearby towns of Stroud, Cirencester and Cheltenham, the Wills family are committed to keeping their small community alive by attracting a diverse population – all prospective tenants are interviewed by Nicholas’ father, Major Tom Wills, to ensure they ‘have the village at the heart of what they want to do’ – and by investing in its future.
As in many rural locations, communications infrastructure has become increasingly important – a ‘fourth service’ alongside heating, electricity and water – in attracting people to the area to live and work. Until recently, mobile reception in Miserden was unreliable at best, and non-existent at worst. ‘There was no signal at all,’ says Jonathan Cobb, who runs the village post office and shop. ‘You had to walk up and down the road with your phone in the air trying to find one.’
Last year, the estate was approached to erect a 4G mast on the edge of the village as part of a government-led scheme to fill in gaps in the mobile coverage network. Despite this not being perhaps the most attractive addition to the landscape, ‘the Wills family’s view was that if the parish and the tenants want it, then they should have it as a modern service,’ explains Richard White, Partner in Strutt & Parker’s Land Management team and managing agent for the estate.
The mast was completed in December – and the impact was immediate. ‘Having 4G and reception everywhere is quite a revelation,’ says Nicholas. Tim Hardy, a resident of Miserden for 20 years, who also runs a garden design business from the village, agrees. ‘Quite a few people didn’t even bother having a mobile phone at all before because there was just no point,’ he says. ‘But with the mast going up, it’s just extraordinary. The 4G reception is actually faster than the broadband we had.’
The heat is on
Broadband speed has been another challenge – and one that has been solved as a result of another, much larger project: to install a village-wide biomass heating system.
With no mains gas supply, most properties had oil-fired heating, which had become prohibitively expensive in recent years. Along with concerns for its tenants facing unaffordable bills, the estate was keen to diversify and find an alternative income source.
‘The biomass project has been a long time coming – we’ve been talking about it since 2012,’ explains Nicholas. ‘Our ethos again played a part in it: with regard to Miserden being a small, sustainable, nucleated village surrounded by forestry, it seemed like a logical step.’
As part of the succession planning, Strutt & Parker was commissioned to undertake a strategic review that highlighted all the aspects of the estate where the team needed to invest time and effort. ‘As well as future-proofing the village, the biomass scheme was about moving assets into trading activity to help protect them from Inheritance Tax, and generate income and profits,’ Richard explains.
He brought his colleagues from Strutt & Parker’s Energy team on board, who designed and developed the project, appointed an installer and supervised the installation. The result is a purpose-built boiler house on the edge of the village containing two 360kW biomass boilers that heat water in a 20,000-litre tank. Two pumps then distribute the hot water to the 38 properties close enough to be connected to the system. Each property has a meter, ensuring tenants only pay for the heat they use, and the estate has committed to produce heat for less than the price of oil.
‘We’ll monitor the oil price twice annually and make sure we’re below that,’ says Nicholas. ‘It will also make a huge difference to tenants because of the way payments are structured: they’ll be able to pay for their heating in monthly instalments, so they won’t have that shock of a £1,000 oil bill in the autumn.’
Following a phased roll-out, the scheme is fully operational, and tenants are already delighted at the prospect of cheaper bills and the ability to spread the cost throughout the year. ‘The biomass boiler means that I can actually put the heating on in here,’ says Kevin Allin, landlord of the village pub The Carpenters Arms. ‘I run a small business, and putting my heating on before cost me a fortune because I was on Calor gas bottles. I predict it’s going to halve my bill.’
Tenant engagement was one of the concerns at the start of the project, but the team held an open forum in the village hall and regular meetings to keep people updated. It took six months to construct the energy centre and lay 2km of heat mains around the village, with the furthest property located 800m away from the boiler room.
‘The hardest part was working with the ground conditions, which can change dramatically over very short distances,’ explains Kieran Crowe, Partner and Energy Engineer at Strutt & Parker. ‘The groundworkers worked really hard to overcome that. What was great was that we maintained good relations between all parties. Half of construction is personality: if you can get on with people, you can get on with the job.’
Making connections
One huge advantage of those challenging groundworks, however, was the opportunity to lay ducting for other services – including sorely needed fibre-optic broadband. ‘Trenching is the biggest cost because of the hardness of the ground,’ says Kieran, ‘but then you have the opportunity to start to put in other services such as broadband and cable TV.’
A third-party provider, Voneus, laid the fibre-optic cables, and is now in the process of agreeing contracts with tenants. As a result, broadband speeds in the village will increase from just one or two megabits per second to a predicted 50-60Mbps.
‘The fibre-optic opportunity was one of the big things for us,’ says Richard. ‘Other estates and villages have the challenge of making the investment required to install fibre-optic cables, but we had already done the trenching as part of the biomass project. We couldn’t really have envisaged at the start of the process how incredibly valuable that would be to us.’
A recent let wouldn’t have happened, Nicholas believes, without the fibre-optic network. ‘Fast broadband is important for appealing to the younger tenant,’ he says. ‘We’ve secured a tenancy with a couple with young children who both work from home as well as abroad, and I think the speed of the broadband really was a deciding factor.’
The trenching also enabled improvements to be made to the mains water supply, with a new cold-water feed to 20 properties to solve low-pressure issues.
Chipping in
The biomass scheme makes financial sense for the estate, too, thanks in part to the government’s Renewable Heat Incentive. It is predicted to have paid for itself within 12-15 years – although this timeframe will fluctuate as heat sale prices are linked to oil prices.
For now, the estate is buying in woodchip, but there are plans to start producing its own next year. ‘We produce a lot of firewood at the moment, so whenever the cost of firewood dips below the cost of chip, we’ll starting chipping a lot more of our own,’ explains Nicholas. ‘We’re also going to grow about 30 acres of specific coppice to cover our requirement.’
Carbon-neutral heating is an important factor in future-proofing the estate, particularly with new minimum energy efficiency standards being introduced in 2018. ‘This is a big issue that estates have to sit up and grasp,’ believes Richard. ‘The problem with period property is that you can’t start installing insulation because there’s no space to put it. But there’s always something you can do.’ At Miserden, this has involved bespoke solutions such as replacing doors and lighting with more energy-efficient alternatives, and there are plans to investigate the feasibility of a second biomass scheme for the main house and estate office.
It’s been a long and challenging journey, Richard says, but one that has ultimately been hugely worthwhile for the estate and its tenants. ‘There aren’t many schemes on this scale,’ he says. ‘A big part of it has been the Wills family’s vision, and I think the vast majority of the tenants feel quite proud to be part of an estate that has actually been as forward-thinking as it has.’
‘It’s grown arms and legs really,’ adds Nicholas. ‘We never set out to change it this much – and I don’t think we’ve changed the character of the village – but it’s represented a monumental leap forward with the biomass, broadband and the 4G mast. The housing was always of a really good, lettable standard, but this has been the icing on the cake.’
Watch a video about the Miserden project and the people who made it happen at struttandparker.com
richard.white@struttandparker.com
kieran.crowe@struttandparker.com