Supporting the Local Community
Buckminster is an extensive traditional rural estate straddling the Lincs/Leics border, centred about 10 miles south of Grantham, a fast-expanding market town in which a significant high street and commercial property investment is retained.
The landholding is held in a multi-trust structure, deploying the use of companies for ‘non-core’ assets. Buckminster Management Ltd is the owned company set up to look after the Estate, with in-house teams for land & property agency, accounting, building projects, forestry and grounds maintenance. A raft of specialist consultants and dedicated contractors is engaged to ensure advice and construction outputs of the requisite good quality.
The properties include hundreds of houses, numerous let farms, a large effectively ‘in hand farm’, woodland, village shops, rural offices, rural and edge of town industrial, supermarkets, leisure facilities and pubs including the eponymous Tollemache Arms. Buckminster Village is owned almost in its entirety. The family lives at the heart in Buckminster Park, and is committed to and engaged on an everyday basis in the long-term well-being of the estate and all who depend upon it. Many of the farm tenants have been involved for generations, and the cottage tenants of long-standing.
The Broadband Initiative
The Buckminster Broadband business began in 2012 on the back of an investment in a fibre optic cable connection from the A1 over 3 miles away. High speed 80mgb is provided over a 75 mile square area over which signal is beamed from an old water tower linking to a network of receivers and boosters. The connectivity has enticed not just existing and new residents and local businesses, but the new occupiers of a rural office scheme enabled by government grant. This has spawned the attraction of Buckminster with its outlying villages as a place to be, live and work, resulting in increased demand for new business space, local employment opportunities and enhanced community sustainability. Residents are now empowered to work from home effectively, allowing a better work-life balance and saving on car travel costs.
Buckminster is a member of a group of like-minded privileged multi-generational family-owned estates seeking to be forces for good in their local economies and environments. They are proactive not only in these fields where financial measures and outputs are more easily expressed, but also in the social value that is often quietly brought to rural communities. For Buckminster as well as virtual connectivity this involves: access to formal and informal greenspace including permissive paths; rental and refurbishment subsidy of community assets such as school, village hall and pub; Covid related rent abatement and write off to preserve business existence to ensure a balanced tenant mix; affordable housing provision; local events facilitation; apprenticeships; and educational opportunities such as the Teaching Trees programme. We seek to bring decency and explain in regular social posts on Facebook and Instagram what we do to engender trust and encourage engagement with and between our various communities.
Buckminster has been selected by the Country Landowners Association to join a working group facilitated by the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise to articulate and quantify the social value delivered by landowners. Other areas being covered are: employment of vulnerable groups; health and social prescribing including care farming; social housing; and community participation.
All this alongside the challenge as expressed starkly in COP27 for businesses to increase biodiversity and reduce their carbon impact, and the hope that government will be insightful and long term enough in its thinking to provide a sufficient regulatory, tax incentive and grant subsidy lead.
Buckminster has been a member of the IFB since 2010.