The Story of Shallowford

Discover where it all began.

East Shallowford Farm has been making a difference since 1976. And it all started with a football.

In the early 1960s, a group of boys kicked a football through the door of a chapel on Falcon Road, Battersea. The woman inside, a determined publisher named Elizabeth Braund, told them they could have their ball back after they'd listened to a Bible story. They came back the next day. And the day after that.

That was the beginning of Providence House - a community organisation that would go on to shape the lives of thousands of young people growing up in south London.

A lung for the city.

The young people she worked with were bright, curious and full of life, but they were growing up without any connection to the natural world.

As the years passed, Elizabeth became increasingly convinced that something was missing. The young people she worked with were bright, curious and full of life, but they were growing up without any connection to the natural world.

In 1976, she did something about it.

Elizabeth purchased East Shallowford Farm, a medieval working hill farm deep in the Dartmoor National Park, to give those young people exactly that. She called it a lung for the city. She arrived with her colleague Rosemary Bird and set about building something remarkable, largely from scratch.

The first Providence House groups made the journey from Battersea to Dartmoor that same year. Young people who had never left London, who had never slept somewhere truly dark and quiet, who had never held a newborn lamb - discovering something about themselves they hadn't known was there.

A farm on dartmoor.

The hay is no longer turned by hand. The old bunk beds have gone. There's even internet now. But the thing Elizabeth built - the warmth, the community, the deep belief that a week on a working farm can do something for a young person that nothing else quite can - remains exactly as she intended.

Thousands of young people have come here. Many have come back as teenagers, as adults, parents and even grandparents, bringing their own children and grandchildren with them. Some have come back as volunteers. Some as staff. Some have come back as trustees, helping to shape the next 50 years of a place that shaped them.

The faces change. The farm evolves. But the heart stays the same.

50 years later.

Following significant investment in the farm's facilities - including a newly-converted barn sleeping 21, renovated farmhouse and new animal barns - Shallowford entered a new era.

A professional staff team was established, programmes were formalised, and the charity began to grow in ways Elizabeth could only have imagined.

In many ways, Shallowford today has the energy of a startup, building systems, growing partnerships and finding new audiences, while standing on 50 years of foundations.