Heckfield Place Heckfield Place

Listen to our panel of sustainability experts: Skye Gyngell, our Culinary Director and London's Spring Restaurant Chef; Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet; and Xenia zu Hohenlohe, a Founding Partner/Director with the Considerate Group.

They will hone in on the issues, why they are problematic, and the practical way we can kick our food waste and other habits.

Co-founder of the Considerate Group, a solutions provider for sustainable services to hospitality businesses, Xenia’s motto is 'Making Sustainability Sexy- 50 Shades of Green’ for which she was recently featured in the FT special report section. http://considerategroup.com/ft-video-50shadesofgreen/ She began her career in the hotel industry 24 years ago. First as a PR for international hotel groups such as Mandarin Oriental Hotels in London and then spent various years at Aman.

Igniting social change, creating brands, campaigns and businesses with soul is Sian’s passion. In 2017 Sian co-founded A Plastic Planet, a social Impact non-profit with a single goal - to ignite and inspire the world to turn off the plastic tap. Their first campaign asked supermarkets worldwide to give customers the choice to buy plastic and guilt free in a Plastic Free Aisle. This campaign rapidly became the No 1 initiative in UK offering a genuine solution to the plastic pollution crisis, with significant worldwide media attention, public support and engagement with industry. A Plastic Planet work with retailers, educators, legislators and governments to reduce the use of indestructible plastic to package our perishable food and drink.

SquareMeal's Female Chef of the Year, Skye is one of Britain's most well-respected chefs, Australian-born Skye Gyngell is best known for her seasonally-focused culinary style. Having trained in Sydney and Paris, Skye moved to London and worked at The French House before securing Head Chef role at Petersham Nurseries, which achieved a Michelin star under her stewardship, and moving to set up Spring at Somerset House in 2014.

Skye joined Heckfield Place as Culinary Director before the opening, and has been instrumental in guiding the culinary concept and estate offering. In her role at Heckfield Place, Skye oversees the menus at Marle & Hearth, as well as the seasonal Sun House restaurant. Her signature style of dishes created using local, fresh ingredients underpin all that is served at Heckfield Place, with Skye working closely with the Home Farm team to serve produce grown on the estate. She is the author of numerous books including Spring, A Year in My Kitchen and How I Cook

Just how do you push your body to the extreme? During our Value of Adventure month, join our panel of explorers in delving into the psychological and physical endurance and stamina needed for extraordinary explorations.

In conversation with The Assembly curator Lucy Hyslop, meet three young explorers and motivational speakers: George Bullard, a world record-breaking explorer, endurance athlete and partner at IGO Adventures; Ironman and Ultra runner Marina Ranger; and adventurer and Guinness world record holder Jamie Sparks.

George has covered almost 2,000 miles on foot in the polar regions and completed countless expeditions around the world, guiding 350 people of all age groups remote and hostile areas. At 14 George was part of a team to swim the English Channel, circumnavigate Barbados and New York’s Manhattan Island and latterly, swim the length of Lake Zurich. At this time he was ranked #1 in the UK for Tetrathlon.

After leaving school George spent 2 months on the Antarctic archipelago of South Georgia followed by George’s largest polar expedition to date. At the age of 19 he achieved a feat that explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the world’s greatest living explorer, described as ‘genuinely ground-breaking’, completing the world’s longest fully unsupported polar journey of all time.

George returned from a world first kayaking expedition from Greenland to Scotland trying to uncover an ancient myth and returned from a 1.5 month trip walking the ice road in Canada in preparation for this trip. He also runs a company called IGO Adventures, which created a series of adventures in the middle of nowhere.

Marina Ranger was 22 when she completed her first ultra marathon, running 250km in 7 days across the Kalahari desert in South Africa with a week's supply of food and kit on her back. Now 28, having completed 20+ ultra marathons, 2 x half Ironmans, 2 x full Ironmans and 1 x long distance triathlon where she represented GBR, it is safe to say she has a full time job fulfilling her love and passion for endurance sports in the hours outside of her career in business operations for a property company.

Marina believes that everyone has the capability to push beyond their perceived boundaries and with hard work and dedication they can achieve great things beyond their expectations. As much as she loves pushing her body to limits, she hopes she can encourage others to too...

Jamie holds the Guinness world record, alongside his friend Luke Birch, for the youngest pair to row across any ocean. Rowing for 54 days, surviving off dehydrated food and desalinated water, they raised a record total for Breast Cancer Care. The following year he captained a crew, which became the fastest four men crew to row unsupported across the Indian ocean. Now motivating all generations across the globe with his stories, and inspiring them to take action themselves.

Join Skye Gyngell, our Culinary Director and Spring Restaurant Chef, in conversation with Darina Allen, who owns and runs the internationally renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co. Cork, Ireland. They talk all things food - from great recipes and writing cookbooks to the wonders of bio-dynamic food and fermentation - with chef Jordan Bourke.

After establishing the Ballymaloe Cookery School in 1983, Darina went on to author such classics as Simply Delicious, Simply Delicious France and Italy, and A Year at Ballymaloe Cookery School. Winner of numerous awards, including the 2018 Gourmand World Cookbook Award, she received an Honorary Fellowship of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium in recognition of a lifetime’s dedication and work promoting Irish gastronomy, food history and culture and the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year 2001. Website: www.cookingisfun.ie

Jordan is a chef, award-winning author and broadcaster. Having trained at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in his native Ireland, he went on to work under the Michelin star chef Skye Gyngell. From there he worked in kitchens in Seoul, Korea, which led to the publication of his cookbook ‘Our Korean Kitchen’ (co authored with his wife Rejina Pyo).

Jordan is a columnist for Waitrose Food magazine, with 12 new seasonal recipes each month. He is also a panelist on BBC radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet and guest presenter on BBC 1's Saturday Kitchen. He is the recipient of both the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Award and the Observer Food Monthly Award. Jordan lives in London with his wife and son.

We all wish to live a life which is environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just and harmonious. In order to accomplish this wish we need to de-clutter our lives from material possessions and from psychological baggage. Physical and spiritual Simplicity is a prerequisite for sustainability and personal as well as planetary wellbeing.

Satish Kumar has written a new book, Elegant Simplicity, and talks about the art of living well on less stuff and have more joy in our lives. Living simply is to shift from glamour to grace and from consumption to creativity.

A former monk and long-term peace and environment activist, Satish has been quietly setting the global agenda for change for over 50 years.
He was just nine when he left his family home to join the wandering Jains, and 18 when he decided he could achieve more back in the world, campaigning for land reform in India and working to turn Gandhi’s vision of a renewed India and a peaceful world into reality.

Inspired in his early 20s by the example of the British peace activist Bertrand Russell, Satish embarked on an 8,000-mile peace pilgrimage. Carrying no money and depending on the kindness and hospitality of strangers, he and a colleague walked from India to America, via Moscow, London and Paris, to deliver a humble packet of ‘peace tea’ to the leaders of the world’s then four nuclear powers.

In 1973 Satish settled in the UK becoming the editor of Resurgence magazine, a position he held until 2016, making him the UK’s longest-serving editor of the same magazine. During this time, he has been the guiding spirit behind a number of now internationally respected ecological and educational ventures. He cofounded Schumacher College in Devon, where he is a Visiting Fellow.

In his 50th year, Satish undertook another pilgrimage – again carrying no money. This time, he walked 2,000 miles to the holy places of Britain, a venture he describes as a celebration of his love of life and nature. In July 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Education from the University of Plymouth.

In July 2001, he received an Honorary Doctorate in Literature from the University of Lancaster, and in the November of that same year, he was presented with the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award for promoting Gandhian values outside India. In 2009 Satish was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws (LLD) by the University of Exeter. In 2013 he was made Doctor of the University by the University of Suffolk. In 2014 Satish was appointed an Oxfam UK Ambassador. Satish is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Gross National Happiness Centre of Bhutan. His autobiography, No Destination, first published by Green Books in 1978, has sold over 50,000 copies. He is also the author of You Are, Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence, The Buddha and the Terrorist, Earth Pilgrim and Soil, Soul, Society.

In 2005, Satish was Sue Lawley’s guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. In 2008, as part of BBC2’s Natural World series, he presented a 50-minute documentary from Dartmoor, which was watched by over 3.6 million people. He appears regularly in the printed media and a range of radio programmes including Thought for the Day and Midweek.
In recognition of his commitment to animal welfare and compassionate living, he was elected vice-president of the RSPCA. He continues to teach and run workshops on reverential ecology, holistic education and voluntary simplicity and is a much sought-after speaker both in the UK and abroad.

Award-winning author, poet and dancer Tishani Doshi reads from - and premieres - a performance of SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS, her acclaimed new Bloomsbury novel, during Heckfield's month celebrating the Value of Silence. She is in conversation with Lucy Hyslop, the Assembly's curator, and music during the performance is created by Luca Nardon.

Of Welsh-Gujarati descent, Doshi has published seven books of poetry and fiction - a signed copy of her new book will be available to buy. Her essays, poems and short stories have been widely anthologised and she has contributed to the Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and The Hindu.

Doshi is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006.

Her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize. She lives in Tamil Nadu.

Set against the vivid and evocative backdrop of modern India, Small Days and Nights is a story of family, of the ties that bind and the secrets we bury.

Escaping her failing marriage, Grace has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she finds herself heir to an unexpected inheritance. First, there is the strange pink house, blue-shuttered, out on a spit of the wild beach, haunted by the rattle of fishermen in their catamarans. And then there is the sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility.

Soon Grace sets up a new and precarious life in this lush, melancholy wilderness, with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha and an ever-multiplying litter of puppies. Here in Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonised by flying foxes, its solitary temples and step-wells shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But Grace’s attempts to play house prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury and bewilderment of life with Lucia.

Luminous, funny, surprising and heart-breaking, Small Days and Nights is the story of a woman caught in a moment of transformation, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives that have meaning.

Acclaim for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods:

‘Intelligent, elegant, unflinching’
Kamila Shamsie, Guardian, Best Summer Books, 2018

‘Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breath-taking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness. This is essential, immediate, urgent work and Doshi is that rare thing, an unashamed visionary’
John Burnside

Isabella Tree is an award-winning travel writer and author and married to the conservationist Sir Charles Burrell. She will be in conversation with Catherine St Germans, journalist and co-founder of Port Eliot Festival, about her latest book ‘Wilding’, which tells the amazing story of the couple's daring wildlife experiment: the rewilding of Knepp Estate in West Sussex.

Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy Sussex clay was economically ruinous, they decided to step back and let nature take over. By introducing free-roaming herbivores —proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain— the Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again.

In less than 20 years wildlife has rocketed and numerous endangered species have made Knepp their home. The Knepp experience challenges conventional ideas about our past and present landscape, and points the way to a wilder, richer future—a countryside that benefits farming, nature and us.