About Me
The hotels where I earn my living.
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| Newby Bridge | Riverside |
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| Damson Dene | High Lowscales Farm |
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| Kitchen Garden | Yewbarrow House |
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| Heroes Of She | Lakes Hospitality |
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| Slow Food (UK) | Beekeeper’s Garden |
The hotels where I earn my living.
![]() |
![]() |
| Newby Bridge | Riverside |
![]() |
![]() |
| Damson Dene | High Lowscales Farm |
![]() |
![]() |
| Kitchen Garden | Yewbarrow House |
![]() |
![]() |
| Heroes Of She | Lakes Hospitality |
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| Slow Food (UK) | Beekeeper’s Garden |
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials
Thoreau
This is the story about one family's quest for self-sufficiency. The idea of a Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where I live with my wife and three daughters, we have a garden and a farm where we produce our own food. We know full well that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising our lives but we do it because we enjoy it and because it forces us to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening and farming are all about patience; a crop will take months to mature; a cattle breeding programme will take years.
The principles of Slow Food are “good, clean and fair” - ‘good’ means that the food should be of good quality, ‘clean’ means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, ‘fair’ means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why we, as a family, don’t use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. I like the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general. This blog of my Slow Life is mainly about my garden and farm in the Lake District, but also about my hotels, where I earn my living, and about the occasional forays, which my Slow Life allows, into the worlds of design, music and local affairs.
Jonathan Denby - jonathan@slow-life.co.uk - Design by Cypher










