Time for a Simpler Life?

If the credit crunch has made you feel like ditching your day job and getting back to the land, here are some possibilities to inspire you...

When financial markets turn hostile, office life loses its thrill and the world seems to be losing its head, we go back to the things that matter. A simpler existence, spending time with family, relishing locally grown foods, embracing animal husbandry, cultivating land, appreciating landscape - all of these are pleasures that have served us well over the centuries. City traders who have lost their jobs will be thinking about their priorities, and looking for new ways of living and earning a wage. As, indeed, might many of the rest of us.

BE TOM AND BARBARA...
Lyn and Caroline Jenkins were hugely influenced by The Good Life sitcom series of the 1970s. "We loved Tom and Barbara when we were first married and, like them, we tried to do it in a small garden in suburbia," says Caroline. "Then we moved here."



"Here" is Rabbs Corner in the village of Lee, near Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, a Grade II four-bedroom cottage with four-and-a-half acres. Here, in the time off they had as GPs, they created paddocks, orchard and vegetable gardens.

They also had three children who wanted ponies. "We had a dynasty of llamas as companions to the ponies," says Caroline. "We started with two, but they had a cria, or a baby, each year. They were delightful, like Bambies with great big eyes and long legs." The manure enriched the garden, bees in the orchard produced honey, fruit and veg was bottled, stored and frozen. "We also have two chickens. They lay an egg each morning - enough for us now the children have left home." The Jenkinses are selling to retire to Devon, so Rabbs Corner is for sale through Hetheringtons (01923 284125) at £1.1m.

JOIN THE FOODIES OF LUDLOW
The gastronomic paradise of Ludlow in Shropshire, stuffed with gourmet chefs, has lured many self-starters into its orbit. There are sausage-makers, organic butchers, cheese specialists, cider and perry bottlers and chocolatiers, all thriving in its warm glow. A newcomer might well be attracted to a registered smallholding with common grazing rights called The Orchard at Cockshutford. The two- to three-bedroom house comes with a large timber outbuilding, four paddocks and a tractor store. McCartneys (01584 872153) is asking £395,000. You can't get closer to the land than this.

TAKE EGGS TO MARKET
"We have had people all over the country interested, including people from London's financial sector wanting to make a complete life change," says Katie Turner of Carter Jonas (01604 608200). For £720,000 she is offering a free-range egg farm with 30 acres near Wollaston in Northamptonshire, and has had 10 viewings already. "It isn't the grand house they would like, but with the credit crunch and a young family, they want fresh air and open countryside," she says.

Abbey Farm is already set up and earns around £80,000 a year. It has two automated chicken sheds, each housing 6,000 birds. "You let the chickens out in the morning, shut them in at night. The feeding, watering and egg collection is all automatic," says Katie. It has a bungalow with three double bedrooms and an agricultural occupancy tie, which means that the owner must be fully employed in agriculture. At the moment the eggs are contracted to big supermarkets, but there is scope to supply local markets and restaurants. The farmers' market at Olney nearby is a veritable feast of wines, cheesecakes, organic meats, fresh herbs, jams and beers.

CHAT TO THE PIGS
Follow in the footsteps of ex-Spare Rib and Daily Express editor Rosie Boycott, who keeps pigs on her smallholding near Taunton. The organic movement is particularly strong in Somerset, and the farmers' markets (Taunton, Shepton Mallet, Cheddar, Wells) are second to none. A complete package called Stream Farm with a four-bedroom house, 21 acres, spare cottage and marvellous stone outbuildings, is for sale near Winscombe through Humberts (01275 333433) at £895,000.

The current owners, David and Joy Brighton, allow a local farmer to keep his herd of Herefords on the pasture. "You could keep 20 pigs in the old piggeries, your own herd in the fields, poultry in the walled yard, and have an office in the cottage - all perfect for a City man with a young family who wants to start again," says David. In spring the woodland is ablaze with bluebells and wild garlic.

KEEP A FARM SHOP
Michelle Hume knows how to change her life. She was a call-centre supervisor in Brentwood and lived in Hornchurch. In 2006, she and other members of her family bought Hillside Organic Farm near Hintlesham, Suffolk. She set about planting her acres with potatoes, carrots, onions, leeks and chard, and filling her polytunnels with pak choi and salad leaves.

"It was already doing veg," she says, "but I opened the farm shop and then started doing farmers' markets at Jimmy's Farm and Alder Carr." Jimmy's Farm, otherwise known as The Essex Pig Company, is the one we all know from the television series about Jamie Oliver's pig-keeping friend. "Others round here do veg boxes but ours are the only organic ones." With her parents, Michelle spends Wednesdays to Fridays harvesting and packing boxes, while last-minute leaves are picked for market on Saturday mornings and the rest of the week is for working on the land.

She is selling because other members of the family want to move on. The three-bedroom modern house, with irrigation lake, nursery land, polytunnels and farm shop is priced at £697,500 through Carter Jonas (01223 368771). "It is a wonderful life," Michelle says. "I have learned to drive a tractor, I've lost two stone and trained myself to plant 300 lettuces in two hours flat."

RESCUE CHICKENS
Forget boring old flesh-coloured eggs. Janine Carr's Leg bar chickens produce light green, her French Marans brown, Welsummers a glossy chocolate, Plymouth Rocks cream, and her black ducks' eggs are dark green. She and her husband Michael keep around 60 chickens - including silkies, pictured - on the half-acre at the back of their cottage at Sydenham near Thame in Oxfordshire. "I also take in battery rescues and look after them until they get all their feathers back," says Janine.

They hope a kindred spirit will buy their four-bedroom ex-farmworkers' home, Cobweb Cottage, priced at £550,000 by Strutt & Parker (01844 342571). Most of the 300 eggs a week she collects are given to friends, family and an old peoples' home where they are made into cakes. "Looking into a nest box and finding four or five fresh eggs, perfectly clean, is a wonderful thing," she says.

RAISE YOUR OWN LAMB
Everyone knows you can't make money from wool any more, but there is still pleasure to be had in keeping sheep. At Lower Essworthy, Hatherleigh, in north Devon, there are five acres to play with, plus a three-bedroom farmhouse, a garden of raised vegetable beds, a large orchard and river frontage. It has been farmed by Thomas Morley and Francesca Marretta. "You can live here and be almost self-sustaining," says Thomas. "Five lambs in the freezer are enough for the year. We make jams and chutneys, freeze peas and beans, and there is room to keep a bullock." Strutt & Parker (01392 215631) and Stags (01837 659420) have priced it at £550,000. Okehampton and Bideford farmers markets' nearby offer opportunities for anyone who isn't afraid of hard work.

REMOTE LIFE
A south-facing croft near Brora, north-east Scotland, with a two- to three-bedroom restored crofter's cottage, outbuildings and five paddocks would make you a virtual castaway for £305,000 from Rural Scene (01264 850700)

Canary Wharf Buy Back by HSBC

Eco New Town is Liked!



The plain black and white cast-iron sign at the empty crossroads in the heart of the South Hams, Devon, reads Higher Sherford and points towards a small group of farm buildings and acres of undulating green fields. The hamlet is as rural as are its immediate neighbours, East and West Sherford, that between them make up the basin of land, sandwiched between Plympton and Plymstock, east of Plymouth.

By the end of next year, that ageing sign will point to a herd of bulldozers carving out a 1,000-acre town that is intended to be Britain's greenest settlement, with cars banned from some areas, three-quarters of the buildings fitted with solar panels and a wide High Street modelled on the Wiltshire market town of Marlborough.

Despite the loss of more than a mile of hedgerow and a plan for wind turbines that will alter the view of a nearby Iron Age hill fort, nobody is objecting. Everyone is as keen as GM-free mustard on what will in future be called just plain Sherford.

For unlike the Government's proposed eco-towns that have raised such hatred across the country, Sherford has been embraced by locals - thanks to the simple trick of including any objectors in the design process.

''Before outline planning permission was applied for, the local authority worked hard to get all interested parties on board,'' says Paul Tyler, the major developments officer for South Hams district council, in whose area the new town will be built.

''We worked with the community and the developers. We had a range of stakeholders from transport to drainage, who were consulted from the beginning. All the information on what the town was going to look like was agreed long before the basic proposal was placed before the council.''

It was more than a decade ago that regional planners agreed there was a strategic need for a new town to meet the demands of growth in Plymouth. An area around Sherford was deemed ideal for development. But when the exact site was picked, there were several thousand objections, particularly from the nearby village of Brixton.

South Hams council did not go down the usual route of sprawling red-brick hutches. Instead, the public and the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment were invited to help.

The Prince's Foundation, a charity set up by the Prince of Wales to help with planning design and building on a human scale, was responsible for Poundbury, the town in Dorset that was built on Duchy of Cornwall land in the 1990s. This time, however, the foundation could not just do as it pleased. For the land where Sherford is to be built is owned by the developer Red Tree.

''Work started with a design exercise with local people to create a vision for the community,'' says Hank Dittmar, chief executive of the Prince's Foundation. ''It was after this consultation that the idea of a single town, rather than several small neighbourhoods, emerged.''

Other ideas included a town hall, a square, and a Georgian-style high street, which the designers claim will be the first purpose-built high street created in more than a century. There will be a health centre, neighbourhood centres, three primary schools and one secondary school.

A community park the size of 300 football pitches will be landscaped and there will be a dedicated cricket pitch and a bowling green.

No buildings will be higher than five storeys. Homes, shops and workplaces will be within walking distance of each other to reduce car use, and all waste, including water and sewerage, will be recycled to cut carbon emissions.

By the end of the design process, when each of the above had been included in the outline planning permission, almost all the objections had been dealt with.

"We have decided to make the best of it," says Brixton parish councillor Derek Curtis. "We had all been to see Poundbury and architecturally it was much better than anything local councils and house-builders had done in the past."

Dittmar adds: "We believe that successful towns, old and new, share certain design characteristics which, when deliberately applied to today's town-making, result in enduring, thriving neighbourhoods that don't damage the environment.

"It's a credit to all involved in Sherford that the South Hams and Plymouth stand to inherit an outstanding example of sustainable urbanism that is bound to benefit generations to come."

Or to put it another way, with luck, by 2020 the old road sign will not be a poignant reminder of how green life was before an eco-town was embraced.


Increases for Small Business Lending 
Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, and Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, will meet chief executives of Britain's leading banks on Wednesday to urge them to increase small business lending to last year's levels of £53 billion.

The move puts the plight of small and medium sized firms at the centre of the Government's economic recovery plan as fears grow for thousands of jobs. Both Labour and the Conservatives are battling to claim the title of saviour of Britain's 4.5 million small businesses which employ almost 14 million people.

Lord Mandelson told MPs on the Commons Business Select Committee that those banks that are being recapitalised by the Government are obliged to lend to small businesses at last year's level, although he appreciated that they had to take risk into account and that some businesses posed greater risks now than 12 months ago.

The Business Secretary said that he was “very concerned from what I heard last week from representatives of small businesses” in terms of access to finance and higher charges being imposed by banks. He said some small businesses were being hit by a “double whammy” of having existing loan arrangements rewritten and being charged more for the new finance.


The Government on Tuesday set out a package of help for small businesses including £350 million towards training and skills and faster payments across a wide range of public bodies. Ministers had already announced that government departments would pay their small suppliers within ten days but yesterday this was extended to health authorities and local councils.

Small companies have complained that their customers, especially large companies, were delaying payments, jeopardising their cashflow. Lord Mandelson said that ministers wanted the “active marketing of competitively priced lending to small businesses at a level at least equivalent to 2007”. He added that “the Government will monitor how the recapitalised banks are delivering their commitments to small businesses.”

Lord Mandelson's comments follow a flurry of political activity directed towards smaller businesses after warnings that credit for the sector is drying up. The Conservatives this week proposed a one penny cut in national insurance contributions and a VAT holiday. The Business Secretary said that he wanted “some care and sensitivity from the Revenue authorities in dealing with business”.

John Cridland, Deputy Director-General of the CBI said: “Small businesses will be glad that the Government is taking action to help them through these exceptional economic times.” David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “The economic slowdown is emphasising the UK's skills shortages. Making more funds available to improve staff skills will benefit small firms.”

The Business Secretary also raised doubts over the future of Royal Mail. He said indications from the independent Hooper review into the postal market “painted a rather stark picture” partly because of migration to electronic mail. He said Royal Mail's pension deficit was “ballooning”. He added that although he had a strong commitment to Royal Mail, ministers “need to see it is becoming efficient, modernised and viable”.

Lord Mandelson indicated that the Hooper review could be widened, potentially plunging Royal Mail into prolonged uncertainty until recommendations can be made to the Government.


Streetwise Aiding Cost Cutting 

  
Streetwise is now the UK's fastest growing online map provider.

This might have something to do with new clients emerging from businesses that are reviewing how much they are spending on maps and plans and realising they can save typically anything up to 50% by switching.

Streetwise has always offered prices far lower than maybe the more traditional suppliers due to the high technology, low overhead approach to its products.

Their online business service offers "planning ready" maps from just £11 including free tools to allow boundaries to be marked up, text added and measurements taken.

To find out more about these services visit us at www.streetwise-maps.com