This is Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite shop – and now it’s mine too
The TV host-turned-farmer has fallen in love with Cotswolds agricultural store Stowag. A dazzled Jim White can see why
It is not often you find yourself agreeing with Jeremy Clarkson. From cycle lanes to the Duchess of Sussex, this is a man who has made a living from expressing deliberately challenging opinions. Except on this: when it comes to his recent suggestion as to the identity of the greatest shop in the known universe, he may well have a point. Actually more than just a point: he is spot on.
Stowag may sound like a particularly unpleasant skin irritation, but this agricultural general store just up the road from Clarkson’s Diddly Squat farm is so extraordinary it issues a challenge to anyone entering its doors: can you really leave without buying a car boot load of stuff? For any customer in possession of a beating heart, the answer is no. On just one visit – ostensibly merely to take a look around – I came away with the following: a bag of birdseed, an axe for chopping kindling, a bottle of weedkiller and a solar-powered garden light. Frankly, my wife and I had to stop ourselves from also buying a wheelbarrow, a battery-powered car tyre inflator, a pair of Blundstone work boots and a bottle of spray for treating scaly leg in chickens. And we don’t even have any chickens.
It may look unprepossessing, this big, nondescript industrial unit surrounded by piles of timber and scary-looking farm implements just outside the Gloucestershire town of Longborough which opened in 2014 – yet, the moment you enter the yard, the smell makes you wonder why you have never been here before. It is an intense amalgam of creosote, woodsmoke and something undefinable, yet decidedly rural. If Gwyneth Paltrow could distil its essence into a scented candle, she would have a worldwide bestseller.
As it happened, I had turned up to the place incognito. After Clarkson’s comments, I had been asked by the editor to call the shop and see if it would be all right to come along and write something about it for the Telegraph. It seemed hardly the toughest assignment. But I was told by a polite but very firm chap over the phone that no, I was not welcome, that they did not need the publicity and anyway, Telegraph readers were not their target audience. Which seemed a bit odd, as I suspect most of us who read the paper would cheerfully buy at least half of the 1,500 items lining the shop’s shelves.
Not, in truth, that this was on a Bernstein and Woodward level of investigative journalism; I simply disguised myself in what seemed to be my most country-looking jacket and, together with my wife, turned up anyway. And what awaited us was astonishing. It is an enormous place, the yard stretching off into the distance, filled with rather alarming looking agricultural devices like the squeeze cattle crush, a sizable metal trap in which cows can be constrained
A pair of castration pliers was great value, as was a jar of cow salve udder cream
while being attended to. At a substantial £6,051, it made you realise why farmers rarely have a second job as stand-up comics; when it comes to agricultural costs, it really is no laughing matter working the land. But never mind that. As soon as you enter the shop itself, it feels like stepping into a retail nirvana. An odd one, it has to be said, but a retail nirvana nonetheless. Just by the front door, for instance, as in a supermarket, you can find the week’s price-cut bargains. When we visited, these were jars of red oxide anti-rust primer, bottles of cold pressed rapeseed oil and packs of waterproof vehicle seat covers.
And once you step deeper inside, you quickly realise it is just like a supermarket, except filled with stuff you really haven’t the first clue as to its purpose. Such as jars of stabilised chrome tablets or a “Keep em off Terrahawk bird scarer” or a pair of castration pliers ( just £20.30). Though actually, I probably had an idea what they were about. Instead of signs saying “Milk, yoghurt and cheese” the aisles are marked up with divisions like “Buckets, Brushes, Troughs and Stable Equipment”, “Electric fencing, oils and lubricants” and “Nails, staples and fencing accessories”.
“If you need any help, just ask at the front desk,” said a kindly assistant in a sweatshirt embossed with the Stowag label when he saw me looking confused in front of the shelf filled with jars of cow salve udder cream. As it happened my wife, a keen gardener, did need some help. “I just wondered how much these were,” she said, pointing to a pair of extendable secateurs. “They don’t seem to have a price.”
“No idea,” the man said. “Last couple of years ,we’ve kind of lost the will to put prices on things. I’ll just go have a look for you.”
When he came back with the price, she had to ask him if he was sure. It seemed so much cheaper than our local garden centre. Because this was the thing: within about five minutes of arriving, it became clear that the place not only had a load of things we really could do with, but they were absurdly good value. Unlike the magnificently swish cornucopia of the Daylesford Organic Farm Shop down the road, where everything is enticing, where everything looks appealing, but you require a mortgage to buy a bottle of olive oil (£80, seriously) and half the national debt of New Zealand to buy a couple of scatter cushions (£285 each), here the prices did not require you to sit down on hearing them. They were a steal. Take the clothing section. There was everything on sale from intensive waterproofs to knee-length boot socks to the shop’s own brand beanie hat. But those Blundstone boots were £20 cheaper than the pair my wife had just bought online. And the shop’s own brand equivalent of the boot came at only £29 a pair. Clarkson could buy half the catalogue with his fee from presenting just one episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
Not that the place appeared anxious to advertise itself or bring in more custom. Across the hour I was there, no more than a steady stream of a dozen or so ruddy-faced locals came in to pick up some Tube Clamp Base Flange or a sack of Rumevite Super Energy Feed Block. For several of those who came in, it seemed as much a social event as a retail excursion. You can buy a coffee there, and pass the time with a bit of rural gossip. By the till, over their hot drinks, a couple were deep in conversation with the sales assistant about the deteriorating condition of a local landowner’s relationship.
“Well I heard she’s been living in the attic for the past year,” said the sales assistant.
“The attic?” came back the woman. “I was told she was out in the barn.”
No wonder Clarkson loves going there. Though you wonder how many retail tips he picks up for his own Diddly Squat farm shop. After leaving Stowag – still blissfully undetected
– we decided to head off to his place in order to compare notes. When we arrived, there were none of the traffic jams that have been so perturbing the locals in the nearby village of Chadlington. Mainly because it was shut. Perhaps Clarkson is too busy visiting his favourite shop to open up his own.