Southwest Organic Farm

Fifteen-year masterplan for an organic farm

Location: Somerset

, UK

Status: Concept design

Service: Masterplanning, Architecture

2025-26

Above Blagdon Lake in the Mendip Hills, Somerset, a 92-acre farmstead has declined over decades of dairy use. We are working with its new owner on a fifteen-year masterplan to turn it into a mixed organic farm, with nature recovery across the land. The farming comes first, and each building is adapted as the business grows into it. Our starting point is that almost everything stays: the limestone barns built up since the 1880s are repaired and reused rather than replaced.

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Keeping the existing fabric holds both the embodied carbon and the character the farm has gathered over time. Around the buildings, the longer ambition is landscape-scale nature recovery: a reinstated orchard, new hedgerows, ponds and species-rich grassland, alongside a shift to renewable heat and on-site energy. The vision is a farming model that is financially, socially and environmentally sustainable: diverse in enterprise, rooted in the character of the landscape, and oriented towards habitat creation and rural employment.

Process

Aerial photography

Site photographs

235.

Southwest Organic Farm

Year:

2025-26

Restrictions: AONB, SSSI

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