offices, which is ideal. We had 250 acres of land and sold 100 of them to Guy’s brother Oli, keeping 150 acres for ourselves. It’s a way of farming together – of being near work, but also away from it. I really wanted to be in the country. If I was going to move away from London, I wanted to be in the countryside.” Geetie welcomes us into her new kitchen, which somehow manages to be spacious yet remarkably warm and cosy, thanks to newly insulated walls and an Esse wood burner. The interior is traditional country farmhouse with a contemporary edge. A rustic wooden dining table and chairs and a Welsh dresser merge comfortably with industrial-style lighting, petrol blue painted cupboards and a brick red kitchen island. As expected, the kitchen island is cluttered with an assortment of fresh fruit, flowers and veg from Riverford. “Guy and I are always bringing home produce from the farm,” she smiles. As we sit down to a freshly brewed coffee and a plate of delectable Portuguese-style custard tarts, fresh from The Almond Thief in Dartington (which Geetie confides she feels no guilt whatsoever in eating, as she’s just been to a Pilates), she tells us about the shared values which brought her and Guy together. “I grew up in a commune in the ’70s, which absolutely shaped my philosophies and how I live my life today. There were 30 of us, and we were as self-sufficient as we could be – growing our own food and making our own clothes. At supper times, the adults would cook in rotation (so once every 15-20 days) and we’d all sit down together, so there were always political conversations in some way or another. I was really politically active from a young age, and really conscious of my responsibilities as a member of society – and I took that with me as I grew up.” After leaving school, Geetie, a gifted vocalist, dabbled with the idea of becoming an opera singer, attending the Birmingham Conservatoire, but left after a short time and moved to London. “When I left the commune, I went to live with my dad in London,” she says. “He was quite a successful entrepreneur, and my stepmother was a very successful civil servant – so they were quite wealthy, and it was almost like a finishing school living with them. My stepmother taught me how to lay a table and how to taste wine. They used to take my brother and I out to really good restaurants in London too, and talk us through the menu.” It was this insight into the bustling London food scene, as well as her field to fork upbringing, that inspired Geetie to go into the restaurant trade. “I moved from the land of growing food to seeing what it could be at the end. I loved those sort of restaurants – really high-end places – so when I started working for them I just couldn’t believe the terrible ingredients they were using, and all the effort they had to put in to make them work. The problem was, the core ingredients weren’t good.” Following six years of hard graft, learning the ins and outs of the restaurant trade, Geetie opened The Duke of Cambridge in Islington in 1998. It was London’s first (and only) wholly organic gastropub, and ground-breaking at the time. “I watched people like Anita Roddick [founder of The Body Shop] be so effective in changing the way we all thought about how we could do things – and that’s what I wanted to do with the pub,” she says. “I wanted people to come in and eat fantastic food and drink and then find out it was all organic, and underpinning it was all these great values.”
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