Great Estates: Welcome to Welbeck Abbey's foodie renaissance
In 2005, the Parente family sat down together to decide the future of their home, Welbeck Abbey. What 100 years earlier had been an estate supported by 600 people (50 alone working in the garden) had become, says Joe Parente – the son and, with his sister, one of the heirs to Welbeck – a bit of a ghost town.
Like many great estates, Welbeck went into hibernation in the years following the Second World War, first as an Army hospital and then for 60 years as an Army training school. The MOD, as the primary tenant, had based its sixth form Welbeck College on the Nottinghamshire estate. The huge buildings that had once stabled the horses of the Dukes of Portland were given over to 200 boys and girls who lived at Welbeck during term time.
“The advantage was that they always paid the rent on time, but they were a big single tenant. They defined where we lived. They were in the house and the heart of the estate, which meant we were restricted in what we could do,” recalls Joe, 34.
His father William inherited the estate from his aunt, Lady Anne Bentinck, who died in 2009. The 6th Duke of Portland, Lady Anne’s grandfather, created the first Welbeck Estates Company and also broke the dukedom’s entail, allowing Lady Anne to inherit the 15,000 acres of Welbeck, as well as 45,000 acres in Scotland and Bothal Castle in Northumberland. The story was one perhaps of the many inspirations for Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey.
But as William, his wife Alison, daughter Daisy and Joe sat down, free from restrictions, what would they do? The Devonshires, distant cousins living down the road at Chatsworth, had opened up their home and while they admired what they had achieved, they weren’t sure opening to the public was the route for them.
The family considered their options. Might it be possible to recreate some of the sense of community the estate had before the Army came?
Flash forward 12 years and Welbeck is flourishing as a local foodie hub, with a farm shop, brewery, bakery and school of artisan food, among other enterprises. Joe, who claims his love of food comes from his Italian side (his father is half-Italian) was in his early 20s when he and friend Michael Boyle, feeling there was a dearth of places to obtain good food locally, did a six-month butchery course and opened a farm shop.
“We were two 24-year-old lads. We had a lot of fun and worked really hard,” he says. At the same time Randolph Hodgson, founder of Neal’s Yard Dairy, hooked up with cheesemaker Joe Schneider and started making unpasteurised stilton using milk from Welbeck’s herd. The rest followed. The artisan food school educates around 16 diploma students a year and offers short courses throughout the year in everything from ice cream making to butchery and baking.
“It’s been amazing because we get to express ourselves through things we’re passionate about and interact with the local economy,” says Joe.
The Academy of Chocolate award- winning Ottar Chocolate, founded by Shelly Preston, is just one of the young businesses that Joe is excited about. “Shelly is one of the most dynamic and amazing people I’ve ever met. She rocked up and said she wanted to make chocolate. To begin with she had a little stall in the farm shop and charged people a pound a chocolate. They were like, ‘how much!?’ But then they tried them.”
Tucking into a chocolate tart from Ottar’s kitchen, and dipping into various jars of sea salted caramel, I am similarly converted.
Meanwhile for Shelly, who makes grown-up chocolate with an emphasis on natural ingredients (her honey is from bees kept on the estate) it’s been the perfect location from which to grow her small business.
“We could have ended up on a new industrial estate, or in London, which would have been really expensive. But by being here, all sorts of things have had happened that wouldn’t have otherwise. I wouldn’t be teaching in the School of Artisan Food, be sold in the farm shop or stocked in Chatsworth.”
Chocolate festivals around the world
Alongside the estate’s foodie focus, the family’s long-established charity, The Harley Foundation, provides support for the arts, from traditional trades like picture restoring to cutting-edge installation art. In three ranges of workshops, from very large to small, there are premises for glass blowers, tile makers, organ makers and ceramicists. In the Nineties, the Harley Gallery exhibition space was opened in the old gas works. Since then the family have opened the Portland Collection space, designed by award-winning architect Hugh Broughton, to show some of the historic art collections.
Joe says his older sister Daisy is “more in tune with the art world”. But as he whizzes around the gallery, his knowledge and excitement about the priceless works of art the family have amassed over the centuries is genuine and infectious.
“There can be this stigma to displaying your wealth, but all this stuff is very personal to us as a family. It’s an art collection we’re very proud of and great art should never be hidden.”
Both he and Daisy have full-time careers in London, he in the high-end restaurant industry (most recently helping run the Michelin-starred Clove Club) and she in publishing, and having a life outside of the estate has always been crucial. “My father was a film critic and then a film producer. You’re not going to learn anything being here. We’ve never wanted to be defined by the estate,” he say adamantly.
If Joe, in his jeans and Vans, appears a million miles more down to earth than the Lord Grantham model, then it’s a conscious choice. He and his sister share a positive attitude to Welbeck: “These arcane institutions and big houses are pretty much redundant. We live in a quite crowded world and it’s more about social conscience than social engineering.”
Currently, Joe spends around 20 per cent of his time at Welbeck and when there he has to fit on quite a lot of caps. Driving around the estate involves constant stops to wind down the window so he can arrange meetings with various estate managers.
While he is reluctant for his two young children to grow up in an environment where they live in the “big house”, increasingly he sees Welbeck as somewhere for them and he and his wife Anuszka to live. Anuszka has already established a WI group with 120 members ranging in age from 18 to 80, where Shelly taught a chocolate class to an audience of 110.
Once a month the brewery opens a bar up on a Friday night and everyone gathers from the corners of the estate. The farm shop staff bring pies they haven’t sold and Shelly has been known to provide chocolate snacks. “We’re creating a community I very much want my family to be part of,” Joe says. “Our ambition isn’t to be a tourist destination with lots of people coming here, but to be a community where people can work and live. Where there’s families and kids and old people supported by their network and dynamic and individual things happening.”
