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An Odd Story
There are nearly 200 farm attractions in the UK. Taplow's is 'leading the way in terms of innovation, quality and customer experience'. Odds Farm Park is 'Farm Attraction of the Year 2013', an accolade awarded annually by the National Farm Attractions Network.
Jackie & Steve Vinden opened Odds Farm Park 20 years ago as a rare
breeds centre. It has since evolved to employ about 50 people and to
provide a unique mix of animal contact, education and leisure. The
latest innovation is a giant indoor playbarn complete with cafe and
espresso bar. Many local children have grown up not knowing what to do
first – pet piglets, have a go at mini-golf, feed lambs, goats and
rabbits, ride the tractor-train or dash past the duck pond to the
adventure playground.
Jackie is the sixth generation of the House family at Odds Farm. Her
great-times-four grandfather William House of Wooburn Common was a
'higgler' or 'general dealer' and tenant of five acres at Hodds Farm
where his son Richard was born around 1852. Jackie's father Lionel
House tells the tale that the land was owned by Portland Estates whose
local manager offered Richard the chance to acquire and expand the farm
in the 1890s. His elder sons Dick and Joe moved to Oxfordshire where in
1913 they started a successful motor bus company running services
between Henley, Reading and their home in Watlington. Their brother
Freddie and sister Annie (known as Dolly) took over Hodds Farm soon
after the Great War. It passed in the early 1970s to Dick's son Arthur
House. He was busy with the buses so he employed Lance Pithers to run
what was by then a dilapidated dairy farm of 140 acres.
Arthur was obliged to sell the bus company in the late 1980s and he
persuaded Joe's grandson Lionel to take over Odds Farm in 1989. Lionel
and his wife Anne sold their farm at Cublington in Aylesbury Vale and
invested the proceeds in renovating the place. Dairy farming was no
longer economic so they decided to breed beef cattle and offer
bed-and-breakfast. However, further change was soon in the air. The
seed was sown when the family visited friends who had a rare breeds
farm in Pembrokeshire. Odds Farm Park now occupies half the land while
Jackie's brother Derek farms the rest.
Nigel Smales
