At home with a filmmaker-turned-hemp-grower in the Cambridgeshire countryside
As the summer sun scorched the earth last year, turning fields into deserts and making puddles out of ponds, a few acres of farmland in Cambridgeshire remained stubbornly verdant. At Margent Farm, hemp towered high over the flat landscape, creating a very dense oasis of greenery among the endless brown.
Steve Barron began growing the non-psychoactive variety on his land in 2017. Its resistance to drought was one of its many draws for the director turned farmer, but chief among them was its ability to lock up carbon from the atmosphere twice as effectively as trees. Before he turned to agriculture, Steve had a successful film career, spanning directing music videos for Michael Jackson and Dire Straits to the 1990 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But seven years ago, he had a light-bulb moment.
‘I was holding my newborn granddaughter in my arms and it made me think about the future – a time when I will no longer be around,’ he says, sitting at a table in his home, which was built from hemp, with the same child on his lap. ‘My generation has allowed a huge decline in respect for nature. I felt compelled to do something that would inspire as much change as possible. I also knew I wanted to create a refuge away from my work and base in London.’
While he was searching for a piece of land and thinking about what he could plant to benefit the environment, his friend (and now co-founder) Fawnda Denham suggested hemp. ‘I’d been having this internal battle about what I wanted to tackle first – carbon in the atmosphere, the depleted quality of Britain’s topsoil, plastics in the ocean, or human health,’ Steve says. ‘When I started looking into hemp, I realised I didn’t have to choose.’
As well as devouring carbon from the air, hemp has long roots that help to replenish degraded soil and can detoxify poisoned land. The fast-growing plant needs no pesticides, herbicides or irrigation. Its fibres can be made into biomaterials for design, fashion and construction to replace plastics, and its flowers pressed for CBD oil to use in balms and lotions. Despite all this, the UK classifies industrial hemp as a controlled drug – unlike many countries – so a licence has to be granted by the Home Office every three years to grow it, with the result that only about 800 hectares of land are cultivated with the crop in Britain.
Steve and Fawnda saw an opportunity to test out its possibilities and make a case for wider cultivation of hemp. Their goal was to create a centre for bio-material research and development, with a planet-positive home for Steve and his family at its heart. Before he bought the land in 2017, Steve knew nothing about agriculture. But the film veteran has long turned ‘winging it’ into a fine art. Born in Ireland and raised in London, he left school aged 15 and, after a year as a clapper loader on film sets, he found himself working in Holland on the biggest movie of the moment – A Bridge Too Far (1977), starring Robert Redford, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery.
A short while later, when Steve was in his early twenties and immersing himself in London’s club scene, a musician asked him if he would shoot a video for his band The Jam. Undaunted, Steve borrowed a camera and followed them around. ‘I didn’t know anything about filmmaking: I just learned through the process,’ says Steve. But somehow that video and those he subsequently directed – including Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, Don’t You Want Me by The Human League, Take on Me by A-ha and Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing – captured the zeitgeist. Steve shot his first feature film, the science fiction rom-com Electric Dreams, in 1984 aged 27. ‘I was completely blagging it but the producers were after the attention I’d been grabbing with music videos,’ he says. His career soon took flight and the idea of learning through doing has stayed with him ever since, reflected in his vision of Margent Farm.
Once Steve found the 53-acre site, he worked with local organic farmer Mike Radford to turn the farm organic. Mike suggested leaving margins around the arable fields to create a haven for wildlife. It was these that gave the farm its name, though Steve chose the archaic form of the word, ‘margent’, used by Shakespeare, in a nod to Puck’s line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘What hempen homespuns have we swagg’ring here?’
The next step was to ‘grow’ himself a home – a prototype, of sorts. The first 20 acres of hemp seeds were sown in May 2017 and the crop was harvested at the end of that summer. Steve commissioned architect Paloma Gormley to design the house. She had already designed a London building that accommodates a weaver’s studio and two apartments using hempcrete, a material that is made from a mulch of hemp shiv (the chopped-up woody core of the plant), lime and water first pioneered in France in the 1990s. He tasked her to create the structure from prefabricated panels of hempcrete in the footprint of a dilapidated, steel-framed cowshed. It was to be off-grid – powered by a wind turbine, solar panels and a biomass boiler. ‘I wanted a practical working house that is honest about what it is and true to its materials,’ Steve says.
Paloma designed a system of timber-framed panels filled with hempcrete, which were made at the specialist brickworks HG Matthews in Buckinghamshire, before being assembled on site in just two days within the shed’s existing steel frame. These provide both structure and insulation. The house is clad in a corrugated rain screen of compressed hemp fibre, bound by a sugar-based resin made with other agricultural waste from the farm.
Its coffee-like hues will soften over time, developing a patina and performing much like wooden cladding. Though Flat House, as they call it, is built to last, its materials can largely be returned to the land at the end of their life.
Inside the building, a glazed living space leads into the hempcrete core of the house, holding a full-height kitchen and sitting room. At the back of the house are three bedrooms (kitted out with hemp mattresses, of course), over two storeys. The exposed hempcrete and wood, coated in a layer of watered-down clay paint, give the interior rich texture, while softening the acoustics. ‘I sleep better here than anywhere else in the world,’ Steve says. He escapes to the house whenever his filming schedule allows, joining his daughter Gemma, her partner Henry and their two young children, who decamped to Cambridgeshire from Nairobi (where they had been based temporarily) during the pandemic and stayed on. The house, ultimately, is a celebration of the materials from which it is made. ‘It puts people in contact with the fabric of their homes, which is usually hidden behind layers of paint, plasterboard, insulation and vapour barriers,’ says Paloma.
Margent Farm now sells the corrugated hemp sheets that clad the house, along with trays, mats and coasters made from compressed hemp fibres. Its latest innovation is a series of wall panels for interiors – a ‘carbon gobbling’ alternative to wood panelling, in various natural tones. They are due to launch this spring under the banner Margent Form, a joint venture with innovative bio-based building system developer Hemspan, to raise funds to take natural hemp fibre products into the construction industry at scale. But pushing products is not the primary goal, says Fawnda, who handles the farm’s collaborations and programming, ‘We are becoming a hub for research and knowledge exchange.’ To that end, the stone barn connected to Flat House serves as an event space, where builders, architects and students can learn about the value of hemp and other bio-materials and experiment with the small hemp press in the nearby workshop.
Part of Margent Farm’s mission is to highlight the poor infrastructure for hemp cultivation in the UK and the government’s lack of understanding of the plant. The CBD oil for the farm’s body oil, balms and salves has to be imported, for example, due to licensing restrictions. ‘Not enough research has been done into its effects here, so regulation means we are forced to waste parts of the plant that would provide CBD,’ says Steve. Margent Farm labels its salves, ‘Hemp Will Save The F***ing World’.
Another collaborator is designer Ally Capellino: the material for her bags had to be shipped in from an organic hemp farm and mill in China (a subject of much debate when producing the bags), because no mill in the UK can spin hemp fibres into yarn. Consequently, Ally’s bags carry a statement about our slowness to catch on to hemp’s virtues. And the team are transparent about the carbon footprint involved in building Flat House – the hemp had to be decorticated (the woody core separated from softer bast fibres) in Leicester and the fibres turned into matting in Yorkshire because of the lack of more local options, though this was offset by hemp’s carbon sequestration.
But the bigger the demand there is for hemp, the better equipped the UK will become. ‘If the design world starts asking for it, change will happen,’ Steve declares.
Mark Anthony Fox1/12Steve Barron and his co-founder Fawnda Denham amid the 40 acres of hemp grown at Margent Farm
Mark Anthony Fox2/12A dining table made by Marble Partners from offcuts is positioned to make the most of the far-reaching views.
Mark Anthony Fox3/12
Mark Anthony Fox4/12Paloma designed the kitchen.
Mark Anthony Fox5/12
Mark Anthony Fox6/12Filmmaker Steve Barron with Fawnda Denham, the co-founder of Margent Farm, at his farmhouse.
Mark Anthony Fox7/12Compressed hemp panels are the backdrop for a bed with a hemp mattress from John Lewis.
Mark Anthony Fox8/12Steve with his granddaughter Aya, his daughter Gemma, and Fawnda, inspecting hemp seeds.
Mark Anthony Fox9/12Herbalist Michael Isted mixes oils and extracts from the farm.
Mark Anthony Fox10/12Ally with a Margent collab backpack.
Mark Anthony Fox11/12Steve surveys the farm from a tree platform.
Mark Anthony Fox12/12Steve with the faithful 1974 combine harvester used to harvest the hemp.
