The Sixteen-Mile Rule Made the Shop Better
We asked for thirty miles. We got sixteen. It turned out to be an improvement.
- Subject
- Planning
- Published
- 2026-01-22
In August 2022 West Oxfordshire District Council served an enforcement notice. The appeal was heard the following March and the inspector’s decision, published in June 2023, upheld it in part: the café, the shop and the car park could stay, the restaurant could not and the barn was to be restored, and the goods sold in the shop would be limited to those produced, grown or reared on Diddly Squat or within a sixteen-mile radius.
The application had been for thirty miles. Sixteen felt, at the time, punitive.
It has made the shop considerably better. A sixteen-mile limit means there are only so many producers, which means you know all of them personally, which means every product on the shelf has a person attached to it. It also rules out the nationally-distributed filler that quietly occupies about a third of the shelf space in every other farm shop in England.
The constraint is now on the sign rather than buried in the terms, because a constraint you have to honour is a better story than a promise you chose to make.
Subject
Planning
Published
2026-01-22
Written by
Somebody who was there
Free
No paywall, no account
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