Is this the most principled man in Britain?
Think everyone’s out for themselves? We talk to the remarkable farmer who’s turned down £275 million to save his village from developers
ROBERT WORSLEY is fixing a stalled engine on his farm track when I visit. He pauses, wrench in hand, beaming, to greet me. Apologising, he says: ‘It’s so inconvenient when a vehicle breaks down in the middle of the drive.’
But there is room, just, to squeeze past and I wait, sitting on the terrace of his handsome 17th-century manor house — the oldest in the tiny village of Twineham, West Sussex — in spring sunshine until the repair is finished.
Robert, 48, is a very hands-on farmer. He and four full-time employees look after his 550 pastural and arable acres of the Sussex Low Weald, as well as a parcel of indigenous forestry nearby — some of its timber has been used for restorations at Hampton Court Palace.
His is a relentless, demanding job — 6am starts and six- day weeks — and he would like to see more of his wife Jo and their daughters Anna, 13, and nine-year- old Rebecca. But he would choose no other way of life; neither would he want to live anywhere else in the world than this verdant and peaceful corner of rural England. Moreover, Robert has proved he would defend his home, land and livelihood, and preserve the quality and character of the countryside around him, at any cost.
For he has rejected the chance to pocket £275 million — a windfall that would elevate him into the ranks of the world’s super rich — from developers who want to buy his farm and build on it.
Mayfield Market Towns plan a sprawling new town of 10,000 homes, an academy, primary schools and shops, which would house 25,000 people. They have offered Robert 100 times the market value of his farm to build on it.
His land, at the epicentre of the proposed new town, would comprise only a seventh of the scheme, which would obliterate vast swathes of beautiful countryside, clog the roads and swallow up a cluster of nearby country towns and villages.
The payout he could expect — up to £500,000 per acre if the project were granted planning permission — would enable him to leave Sussex (in a private jet if he chose), buy a vast estate miles from any threat of pending development and ensure his children and their heirs would never need to work again.
But in an age of venality and acquisitiveness he is a rarity: a man of strongly held beliefs and integrity, who will not be bought.
Robert refuses to take the developers’ money. He’s been hailed this week as a national hero. So is he the most principled man in Britain? ‘I don’t know about that,’ he laughs. ‘People have said I must be mad. But those who know me will tell you I’ve always been immensely saddened when another farm disappears, when the character of our ancient villages changes. When I see the people of Sussex, country people, besieged by creeping urbanisation, it upsets me.
‘Over the years I’ve bemoaned the results of “progress” and the gradual erosion of a lovely part of our countryside. To contribute to that and receive a vast amount of money in exchange would make me the very worst kind of hypocrite, wouldn’t it?’
It is two years since Robert was approached by agents f or t he developers who, at that stage, wanted to buy j ust 160 acres of his farm.
With his agreement to sell, their scheme would become more viable when they put i t to the l ocal planning authority and therefore more likely to be approved. Robert could expect up to £500,000 an acre — and certainly no l ess than £250,000 — if his prime farm land was built over.
‘For a moment I was dazzled by the potential sums on offer,’ he says. ‘I thought: “£ 80 million. That’s a Lottery win.” But as soon as I considered the implications I knew I could never accept it.
‘What would I be doing to my neighbours and the other farmers round here? I could not be held responsible for putting the area under concrete.’
So he refused the offer and remained obdurately resistant, even when the stakes got higher and higher.
‘ I heard nothing from t he developers for about a year, then they said they had a new proposal. They said: “It’s a much bigger project and we’d like to buy all your land.” I stood to gain an eye-watering sum, £275 million, if the project was approved.’
When Robert remained steadfast, however, the developers adopted a more hectoring tone: ‘They told me if I didn’t agree to sell up and be part of it, they’d just build round me.’
As the largest land owner in the earmarked area, Robert knew his decision would be pivotal to the scheme’s success. But he remained immovable. Every man has his price, runs the old adage. But he would not be bought.
He remembers: ‘My blood ran cold for a day or two when I thought all the land owners around me might take up the developers’ offer. The only reason I’d ever agree to sell up would be if I was hemmed in and engulfed by a new town.
‘But then I was heartened to hear that my neighbours all viewed the scheme with as much horror as I did. No one wanted to sell.’ His wife Jo, 49, was not tempted by the prospect of spectacular riches. ‘I’ve never been materialistic: money doesn’t interest me,’ she says. ‘What we have here is all we want. This is paradise.’
She gestures across the lawn, which runs past an ancient outbuilding and down to a rush-flanked pond. ‘ We know how fortunate we are. More money can’t buy us anything we haven’t already got.’
So, the doughty villagers of Twineham joined Robert and Jo in opposing the scheme. They formed a campaign group, Locals Against Mayfield Building Sprawl (Lambs), to mobilise their opposition.
And though they, as well as Horsham District Council and two Sussex Conservative MPs — Sir Nicholas Soames and Nick Herbert — are appalled by the plans, the shadow of them blights the area.
‘ It seems iniquitous that the Government has failed to put an end to the project,’ says Robert.
‘We still live with uncertainty about whether it will get planning permission. We’re fed all kinds of promises about local people being empowered to make decisions, but they’re cynical lies.
‘ In fact, central Government, lobbied and driven by smoothtalking developers who stand to make a huge amount of money from house building, has the authority to steamroller over local opposition and impose its building plans on us, and we’re completely powerless to stop them.’
A less scrupulous man would not, of course, be troubling himself with the ethics of government, but Robert expects probity from those in power who shape the planning l aws. He will never, he says, relinquish agriculture — his family’s livelihood f or 400 years — to accommodate the schemes of a rapacious developer.
‘There’s something very satisfying to the soul about farming,’ he says. ‘ I’ve a l ong way to go before I achieve the happy state where everything’s perfect. But I’m far luckier than most.
‘ I ’ m hugely privileged to be custodian of a piece of the county I love, where Jo and I were born.’
The Worsleys have been farmers since the 1600s. They came from Bristol to Sussex in 1860 and bought land and property in Cuckfield, where Robert’s widowed mother Jane still lives. His brother Charles, 46, runs their parents’ farm.
Robert, an alumnus of Stowe School — where he boarded from the age of 13 — trained as an engineer after leaving school, then bought and sold property.
He married 16 years ago and the couple bought Twineham Place Farm, with its adjoining land, for around £1.7 million in 2001.
‘It is known as the “new house” because there was another on this site, before ours was built in 1630, which dated back to 1212. We still have some of the original medieval, smoke-blackened timbers in the roof,’ he says. The house was a ruin when they took it on; its farmland — which they bought in instalments — was choked with weeds.
‘It was a mess,’ he says. ‘The floor timbers were so rotten we had to walk, precariously, along the joists. There was a rusty iron bath and a drip of tepid water. The rooms were cramped and dark.’
Today, all is bright and burnished; oak beams and floorboards, harvested from the Worsley forests, meld the ancient with the new. A handmade staircase, with acorn finials, zigzags skyward into an airy attic.
Order has been restored to the pastures and hedges are trimmed. On balmy evenings, nightingales carol in the sweet, spring air.
It is a slice of old England, a piece of rural heaven. And Robert wants to preserve its beauty and order.
The churlish may accuse him of nimbyism. Actually he is the reverse: an altruist. After all, with the vast wealth he would gain from selling up, he could buy himself privacy, indolence and luxury.
But his prime concern is the wellbeing of others. Like his father Michael — who died last year, aged 88 — and his grandfather Richard before him, his wish is to leave a small mark for posterity.
He takes the precedent from his grandfather, Richard Worsley, an officer i n the Sussex regiment, who served heroically i n World War I.
Before he died, prematurely, in 1937, in order to commemorate the sacrifices of his comrades in the conflict, he dedicated a parcel of land to Cuckfield Parish Council for a war
‘I can’t let them concrete over the whole area’ ‘I won’t take the cash and run — I love Sussex’
memorial. He was canny, too, because he wanted the land to be there for future generations, not just as a lasting tribute to the war dead, but also as a communal green space for villagers.
This meant a clause in his will dictated that, should it ever be under threat of development, the Worsley family would have the right to buy it back for £250, the sum Richard originally paid for it.
Unsurprisingly, several decades ago the site was earmarked for housing and Richard, long dead, was not there to defend it. But his son Michael was.
‘My father marched to the council offices in Haywards Heath, took out his wallet and proffered £250,’ says Robert. ‘He said “If you mean to develop it, I’ll buy it back from you” and the land has remained a green space ever since.’ A similar spirit fires Robert. ‘You could ask: “Who wouldn’t take the cash and run?” Well, I won’t. Perhaps that makes me a fool. Or mad. But I don’t think so.
‘I don’t see myself as a person of great moral principle either. I’m just someone who loves Sussex. And it isn’t just sentimentality.
‘I understand, too, when people want to come and live here. And, of course, I know t hey need homes. The provision of homes is a tough question and a relevant one, but there are enormous numbers of brownfield sites that could and should be developed first.
‘At some point we have to say: “Enough development in our rural areas.”
‘It’s not just to preserve green open spaces, but also to sustain the quality of life for those who already live in them.
‘ The irony is that if the population density increases to the extent that the Mayfield Market Towns property developers wants it to, mid Sussex will cease to be a place where anyone will want to live.’
Lee Newlyn, a director of the developers, said this week: ‘There is a huge shortage of housing in this region and we believe that delivering these new homes in the form of a new town, with all the proper infrastructure and facilities in place, is a much more sustainable alternative to an add-on development i n and around existing towns and villages.’
What he doesn’t mention, of course, is quite how much profit it will make his firm.
Meanwhile, Robert ponders the question: who will pay the price if the new town development were to take place?
‘It would be the people who live in the villages and little towns around here already,’ he says. ‘And I’d be doing them a huge disservice if I sold.
‘Even if I live until I’m 100, my life will only be a fleeting moment in the history of our village.
‘But I feel passionately that my job is to preserve our home, our farm and our rural environment as a legacy for future generations.
‘And if I failed to do it, it would be a huge betrayal — of our land, our history and of all the people who live in this part of Sussex.’
I f only more custodians of England’s green spaces were so principled, we could have a fighting chance of stopping the countryside being concreted over, acre by relentless acre.