Innovation was the order of the day at Coleshill when work began on revamping the Earl of Radnor’s home farm. The previous farmstead had already received the seal of approval from radical politician William Cobbett, who brought rural poverty to the attention of 19 th century parliament. “I saw also at Coleshill, the most complete farmyard that I ever saw, and I believe there is in all England, many and complete as English farm yards are,” Cobbett wrote on a fact finding ride across southern England in 1826. “And here, too, there is no misery amongst those who do the work,” Cobbett noted when he stopped off to view the Locust trees the Earl of Radnor had brought from him twenty years previously. “Here all are comfortable; gaunt hunger here stares no man in the face.” The idea of this efficient, split level farmstead came from the Earl of Radnor’s land agent but it was architect George Lamb who designed the ground breaking farmstead. ...