Long Lane; A founder's diary. 305 days until opening.
Journalling, foundations and a chainsaw near-miss.
“These are the times we must remember to enjoy. We can only experience this very moment now.” This the reminder I’m giving myself daily, as the momentum gathers and we start each day with a countdown to opening. It’s getting busy on site now, the main focus currently being the strip out of the house and the clearing of the land. Im acutely aware of how quickly these weeks will pass, finding myself intimidated not by the scale of what’s to come, but the thought that I might miss it for wishing away the future.
A thought that I’ve been deliberating over is “who do I need to become to call this in?” As different from, “what do I need to do to build this?” Something I have never done will require me to become someone I am yet to be. Im seeing that, concurrently, the project is Louie as much as it is Long Lane. I need to be calm and measured, detail-orientated, open-minded, collaborative, deeply empathetic, courageous and creative. Reflecting on the moments I behave out of alignment with those states of being, I think about the internal narrative that allow those behaviours, the environments that make them possible and how I might give myself an opportunity to change. I do this literally in 4 columns; negative behaviour, internal dialogue, environment and fix. I then share these learnings with Harrison and Hakan, and ask them to hold me accountable.
I’ve been living on site for the last few weeks. Getting into a routine of rising early, going through my morning routine, training and blocking out time for focused work, followed later by an evening routine, has given me the space and state of mind to be as dialled in as I can remember. I am not naturally well organised, so by creating systems and routines, I’m able to better manage my time. Even so, what I am learning by staying on site is that waking up on the edge of a forest, taking regular walks to the sound of birdsong and the aroma of flowers and herbs, living a slower and more considered life to the one I was living in London, is already helping me to become the person I aspire to be, thats perhaps being a steward of such a space.
These are our final days living on site. We’ll soon be moving to a cottage 10 minutes away, as the house is returned to a shell and works begin. This week all the bathrooms have been stripped and the furniture has been removed, without incident. The chimneys, however, have caused an issue. A design fault, going back 200 or so years, has meant that the passages are easily blocked, as our chap who had the unenviable task of clearing them found out when 2 centuries of soot descended on him. We’ll be able to have wood burners in the fireplaces and I love the idea of people congregating around them in the colder months.
Jack returned this week after some back and forth as to his farm plans, meeting with Nicholas our landscape designer, and Harrison and I to walk through the farm before starting to clear the land. There’s some stubborn tree stumps that need to come out, and the land is on a bit of a gradient, so as we dig the HAHA to stop the deer coming in, we’ll use the same digger to pull those up. Jack’s philosophy is aligned with ours; make use of everything. We’ll make features of these tree roots. The other idea thats come from Jack this week is the repurposing of the concrete from the demolition to go into the walls of the farm in gables. This is cost-effective, but also supports carbon capture and provides an additional environment for wildlife.
The farm, as you walk from the house, will begin with a Greenhouse from Alitex. As you enter, there will be an outside dining space and then you’ll emerge into a geometric pattern of beds, with a water feature in the middle. Through the back of the farm there will be “no dig” beds and at the end polytunnels. An important consideration is to align the needs of the kitchen with the productivity of the garden, so our search for a chef that understands nutrition, taste and local, seasonal produce is becoming even more timely. Jack has suggested if we can begin planting in October / November, we’ll have some produce ready for April (weather dependant of course) but most of our produce will come out in June & July.
Fancying myself as a bit of a vegetable Willy Wonka, my task for Jack was to make as many areas as possible food-bearing. We’ll have fruit trees lining the HAHA, herbs along the pathways and we’re now discussing having a mushroom-growing, wood chip pathway out of the farm and into the forest, where foraged foods will be sourced and a range of them feature on the menu. Connecting these different growing spaces with the kitchen, the restaurant and the composting area is a way I believe we can deepen our guests connection to food. Beyond having these spaces present in the experience, workshops on growing, cooking, composting and foraging will be a regular feature of our programming. We’d love to extend this to schools and colleges, as my fear is so many children are growing up having never learnt how food grows or even how to cook it.
The restaurant foundations are next to go in, as we’re extending the kitchen to allow for greater production. We also need a processing area for the produce from the gardens and forest. Jack is still looking for an appropriate space to put a container, in which we can grow mushrooms, but as yet we haven’t been able to agree where it’s best placed. The fermentation and sprouting spaces will be inside, but again we haven’t allocated a home for them just yet, awaiting guidance from the chef as to the amount of space the kitchen will need to manage restaurant, farm shop and event demand. We can make assumptions, supported by data from similar concepts and past experience, but there’s really no way to know for certain how many people will visit each day or how they will naturally use the space, so we need to be agile and open to diversifying our offering accordingly.
Operationally speaking, we’ve been fortunate to be guided by the team at TGP, which has added a layer of detail to the interiors to make them operationally effective. We discussed details like an area for people to leave their phones. Would this be visible? The implication of it being private would mean that it would require a staff member to retrieve. What’s the cost implication? Could we turn this into a feature, if it was public, to encourage people to have a digital detox? Its helped to test our ideas as to their operational feasibility and update our financial assumptions according to our needs in terms of labour and space, taking our absolute ideals and giving guidance around how to achieve them in a way that works for the business and our guests. Having been through this exercise we feel much more confident!
Of course, our core values that make the concept what it is will not change, but operationally how we deliver Long Lane can change as we bring more people into the space. For that reason, we are being conservative in our early assumptions as to members and guests. For members, we have begun to build out our website and app. Jamie, who’s gone beyond his scope as consultant and been infinitely helpful across far reaching areas of the project, has built out possibly the most detailed brief I have seen. We’re amalgamating a number of existing platforms across restaurant reservations, hotel reservations, longevity clinic reporting and event bookings. We also need a CRM that can make guest data usable for our teams and help to personalise the experience for our guests.
Also under Jamie’s guidance, and another detailed brief, we’ve decided to do some further work on our branding. The current brand assets were developed so that we could create a deck and start to race investment, but with the focus on completing the raise and securing the site, we are yet to develop it further so that it can be utilised for things like website or way-finding. Our interior designers, Nic & Ying, have also done some incredible work on the interiors that we feel should be brought into the branding, so we’ve begun the process with a new agency to think about how we show up, both online and on site, to make sure its consistent. We’re also thinking beyond this location, and so our brand needs to be thought about in the context of different locations with their own nuances and influences. Would it still work if Long Lane was on a ranch? Or a beach? For example.
Some issues… planning! We have made some additional applications and frustratingly, we have had some objections. Also, the sheer cost of an application, being more than £10,000, plus the consultancy fees that go with it. We have, however, been invited to a parish council meeting to put forth our vision for the site and my optimistic side says that those who have objected are simply afraid of the unknown, and on hearing what we’re doing, should be more forthcoming. We’ve begun to collect emails from local people and will be inviting them to the site as we build, and ahead of opening for a preview event. The concerns, mostly around noise and an increase of traffic, are of lower risk than the previous use case granted as a wedding venue, and we have plans on how to mitigate the impact here. Noise is an easy one - if the nearest home, almost a kilometre away, can hear it, then our guests sleeping certainly can and this would be terrible for a business that’s selling a perfect night’s sleep! As for traffic, intermittent use for members is less of a build up than wedding guests all arriving at once, and we are looking at shuttles to collect hotel guests from the train station.
Im grateful to be writing about this next issue, after a close call with a chainsaw. We had a phone call to advise us that the stream flowing through our property is currently blocked by falling trees. As a trout stream, the current is important and as the land is ours, it is our responsibility to maintain it. An opportunity to wade into a river with a chainsaw? No problem at all. Having never used a chainsaw, I wasn’t prepared for how much fun it was, but also how dangerous a lapse in concentration might prove. As I stood unbalanced in a flow river, holding it between my legs, a tug at the engine and a wild swing almost took out my leg. It’s on video, so you can join me in relief when it comes out on YouTube! We did, however, get much of the tree cleared and out of the river, but hadn’t realised just how many were there, so this might be a job thats complete over a period of time.
The investment raise is ongoing. Ahead of circulating our new deck, we’re awaiting some renders and have since updated the financial model. Having secured over £4 million so far, we have sufficient funding for the foreseeable future and active conversations with a number of parties who wish to close out the balance. Naturally we’d like to close the round as soon as possible and our objective is to have this closed out by the end of July. At the same time, we’re working with a number of our existing investors, who have been incredibly helpful,. Jessica, who’s helping us with the “people” side of the business, has been joining our pre-opening calls and helping us prepare to hire. At the moment we’re looking at how we adapt traditional hierarchical structures, and my homework has been to read “sacred commerce” - which so far I love!
Reflecting on where I was 10 years ago, working in nightlife and stuck in a cycle of drinking, late nights and anxiety, it’s hard to believe where I am now. I have to recognise that this isn’t possible without that, and that this is somewhat of a full circle moment, redesigning social spaces for more conscious connection. I feel so incredibly grateful to have this opportunity, to be on this journey, and will enjoy every one of the 305
days to go.