Jeremy Clarkson ordered to shut Diddly Squat restaurant and café after he 'ignored' council warnings
Clarkson vows to fight on
Jeremy Clarkson has been ordered to shut down the café and restaurant on his farm in Oxfordshire after cheerfully regaling Sunday Times readers with news of finding a “delightful little loophole” that allowed them to open.
Clarkson, the presenter of The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video, and a columnist for the Sunday Times Magazine, was told by West Oxfordshire district council in August that he must cease the operation of both the café and restaurant on his farm outside Chadlington near Chipping Norton and remove all paraphernalia associated with both within six weeks of notice being served (August 12).
The council described the use of the farm as “unlawful” and the shop and restaurant’s nature, scale and siting as “unsustainable and incompatible with its countryside location within the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty”.
The council said the farm must also stop selling products other than those made on the farm, those made within a 16-mile radius of it, or others that the council has allowed.
“Council officers have worked with the owner and planning agents of the business, over many months, to investigate breaches in planning control, advising on how the business can be operated in a lawful way and trying to reach a solution,” the council said in a statement.
“The business continues to operate outside the planning permissions granted and advice has been ignored. The activity has also had a significant impact on the local community.”
Clarkson, however, has launched an appeal against the council’s order to close the restaurant with agents representing him and the farm describing the council’s decision as “excessive” and claiming that planning laws had not, in fact, been breached.
In its appeal against the enforcement notice dated September 9, the John Phillips Planning Consultancy argued that existing planning permission gives them the right to use the farm as a restaurant, and there has been no “material change” to the land.
It also said that the farm’s sale of food and use of tables and chairs was lawful and that it would take longer than the six weeks given by the council to remove all tables, chairs, catering vans, mobile toilets and “landscaping materials” from the site.
The Planning Inspectorate, a government agency, has agreed to hear Clarkson’s appeal, with a date still to be set for the hearing.
Ongoing saga at Diddly Squat
In September 2021, Clarkson announced his intention to open a restaurant in a converted lambing shed on his farm, saying that British beef farmers were being unfairly squeezed out of the market by the government’s post-Brexit trade deal with Australia which, he believed, had flooded the market, precluding British farmers from competing.
The only solution, he said, was for beef farmers to sell their produce directly to restaurants and his announcement was greeted warmly by many local farmers if not so much by other residents in the area.
After addressing a meeting on the topic at the village hall in Chadlington in September, Clarkson said that the idea for a restaurant and a 70-space car park had gone down “like a shower of sick” with villagers.
The popularity of the hit Amazon Prime show Clarkson’s Farm has brought thousands of tourists to the area, mostly coming to visit Diddly Squat’s farm shop and hoping to catch a glimpse of Clarkson himself.
Local residents have complained about the huge increase in traffic in the formerly quiet rural area created by the influx of visitors, with, among other things, damage to nearby grass verges as a result of roadside parking.
“There are clearly more Clarkson fans around the place,” Nigel Ridpath, one local told The Guardian. “You can tell by the sort of vehicles they’re driving, Subarus with gold wheels, there’s absolutely more of that.”
Both Clarkson and other nearby farmers expressed disappointment in January this year when West Oxfordshire district council refused planning permission for the restaurant on the grounds that it would be out of character in the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Undeterred, however, in July Clarkson announced that the farm had discovered a “delightful little loophole” meaning that the team at Diddly Squat was able to push ahead with the restaurant opening, albeit with a few caveats making for an altogether idiosyncratic dining experience.
“Before making your booking, you should know that it’s small, outdoors and very rustic,” read the blurb for the restaurant on the OpenTable booking app.
“Ordering a beer or going to the lavatory isn’t as easy as in your local pub and we don’t cater to the faddy.”
Guests are taken to the restaurant from elsewhere on the farm in a trailer towed by a tractor. Apart from one tiny section, dining is entirely outdoors, with the toilets (in this case, four portaloos) located some 250m from the dining area.
“There is no menu as such — we simply serve what’s available that day. But worry not, your table will be given a selection of snacks and starters followed by a roast and a pudding. Our bread, made with Hawkstone lager, is absolutely brilliant.”
Apart from the dessert, customers have a choice of beef and little else, and a three-course meal at Diddly Squat costs £49 per head, with guests having to agree to be filmed as part of the Clarkson’s Farm TV series.
The restaurant has garnered mostly highly positive reviews.
When The Times’ Countryside Correspondent, Will Humphries, visited, he described the food as “predictably fantastic”, with “Clarkson’s shorthorn cattle being used in myriad mouth-watering ways.” Almost all the ingredients come from either the farm itself or nearby growers.
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