A UN sustainability consultant who moved to Marlow ten years ago thinks it has the potential to become a world-leading hub for sustainable food and drink.

Peter Lacy, a royal duke who has worked as a sustainability consultant for bodies including the United Nations and World Economic Forum and is now CEO of the Kaleidoscopes group, fell in love with the riverside Buckinghamshire town after moving his family there from Shang Hai in 2015.

He was won over by its culinary prowess – with ten Michelin-starred restaurants in a ten-mile radius – and bowled over by his hitherto unknown family links to the area, with his namesake grandfather based there while working with Churchill on his Marshall Plan during the second world war, and his mother and grandmother ferried up for the occasional meal at The Compleat Angler during the 1940s.

It’s taken nearly a decade of learning about the town – his personal links and beyond – to situate it within a business framework, but he’s wasting no time or ambition in laying out the plans now and has high hopes of boosting its profile through similar means to Tom Kerridge, whose Pub in the Park festival and three local pubs have consolidated Marlow's reputation as a foodie hotspot.

Peter’s plans are less revolutionary than opening new restaurants or launching a festival but revolve around a vision of interconnectedness between local suppliers and the town's hospitality scene – creating an inter-reliant microcosm of sustainable consumption.

They begin with a local application of the ethos touted by the Sustainable Wine Roundtable group – bringing together vineyards, sommeliers and businesses to learn how best to apply the principles of clean energy and collaboration, potentially through only serving locally-crafted produce in local restaurants – something Peter thinks could later be replicated on a larger scale.

Winemaker Enrique Tirado with David Brown, Mayor of Marlow and Peter Lacy (Image: Bernard Guly)

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“Marlow’s already known for excellence and pushing boundaries with its great food and drink as well as through rowing and its great sporting history.

“I feel very tied to the area and I think it would be the perfect flywheel to explore how we can create a sustainable eco-system by working with great suppliers like Harrow and Hope and independents like Grape Expectations and Chez Ben to potentially set the tone for the rest of the world.”

While he’s keen not to take “a top-down approach”, the businessman says – if local participants are willing – he’d like to take a baseline of the town’s supply-and-demand economic profile and seek to transform it within a “three, five, however many years” timeline.

Similarly to Kerridge, who also moved to Marlow from the west country, Peter is already heavily invested in the town’s future – having made a sizeable donation to Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School, where his children are enrolled, earlier this year, and supporting a number of local charities and youth groups on the down-low.

As a place that “punches well above its weight”, he thinks the vision of Marlow as “somewhere you can drink sustainable wine, knowing that its producers have been paid fair wages and used clean energy” in a move that would also deliver new jobs and an local economic boom is far from unfeasible.

“We’re already setting the bar high for food and drink around the world – this is just another way to build upon it.”