Huge crowds have visited Jeremy Clarkson ‘s Diddly Squat Farm shop since the Amazon Prime show Clarkson’s farm debuted back in 2021, and has been in the centre of several rows with authority.
The Top gear star, 63, has faced plenty of hurdles along the way, including dealing with local authorities – from extending the car park at his farm shop to attempting to open a restaurant on-site. Most recently, which viewers could see in the third season of Clarkson’s Farm, the star was served an enforcement notice on his farm shop by West Oxfordshire District Council.
This means that advisor Charlie Ireland has to audit the farm shop, and prevent the star’s girlfriend Lisa Hogan from breaking rules by stocking products made more than 16 miles away. But luckily, The Express’ Alex Evans managed to visit the Farm Shop in Chipping Norton, in the Cotswolds, before this latest furore, and spent a tiny fortune on Clarkson’s local product. You can read his thoughts below – but here’s a spoiler – “it was expensive, but worth it”.
I went with a budget in mind – I am from Yorkshire, after all – but within a few minutes inside Jeremy Clarkson’s bustling farm shop, that budget was blown clean out of the water. Word of warning: it is not cheap.
In fact I don’t think I’ve ever paid more for snack food than I did for the small haul of bits and pieces that I did at Diddly Squat Farm – but that wasn’t the thing that surprised me.
It started off well enough. Having set the sat-nav for Chipping Norton, I eventually found my way to the overspill car park near the farm shop, where at midday, cars were pouring in and out in a hive of activity. The road outside the shop – made famous now from the Amazon Prime Video series – was covered in cars on every patch of grass available, lining each side of the street.
The car park – a muddy field – was free, and there was no time limit or any kind of number plate registering, so you’re free to park up and spend as much time as you want inside the farm shop.
And you’ll need a lot of time. I was told that during the Welsh half term week, families pour over the border for days out packed the farm, creating “four hour queues” for the farm shop.
Me and my wife waited an hour and 15 minutes in the queue, which in proper British fashion snaked around the field outside the shop in a completely natural occurrence.
My first disappointment was the Cow Juice. The Clarkson named milk ran out at the self-service Cow Juice vending machine just as we reached the front of the queue, which was a shame. Once inside the farm shop, you get a few minutes to shuffle round the (very small) shop and check out the shelves.
For such a small shop – no more than about 10ft by 8 ft – there’s quite a lot of choice. Everything from coffee to Jeremy’s Beef Jerky, cheese, pasties, Hawkstone lager, flour, pasta, rapeseed vegetable oil, fudge, crisps… the list is endless.
There was also ice cream, lollies, cider and quite a few other snacky items and there seemed to be more fridges and freezers than on TV. I had heard there was meat like sausages and bacon, or bread, for sale at the shop but by the time I got inside it was all gone and I was left with mostly pre-packaged foods still in plentiful supply.
I opted for two bags of Diddly Squat Farm Hand-cooked Crisps, one ready salted and one cheese and onion. £1.70 a bag, for single servings the size of Walkers crisps.
Bee Juice (aka honey) was on my hitlist. £12 a jar. I grabbed ‘Bee Juice Bites’ – chocolate coated honeycomb – and a bag of Diddly Squat Fudge. These were £4.80 apiece for quite small bags.
Rounding out my shopping list, I grabbed a can of Diddly Squat Shandy (because it’s gluten free so it won’t kill me), a bottle of apple juice and a candle that smells like ‘Jeremy’s B****ks’, which I spotted from a series one episode so, I had to go for it. The shandy was £3.25 for 330ml and the apple juice £2.40 for 250ml (or almost £10 a litre), so as you can see, none of this is cheap.
Unfortunately I’m not sure how much the candle cost as it was behind the till – like a naughty top shelf purchase and when I asked for a receipt I was told ‘sorry we’re paperless’.
Other items I didn’t pick up but were for sale included a jar of pesto for £7.99, chutney for £5.80 and smoked sea salt for £4.50 a jar. Coffee was £6.95 for a paper bag of the stuff, while granola was a similar price.
All of this may sound a touch negative – especially when I found Cotswold honey for sale in a nearby village for £6.50 – but I actually expected these prices.
This isn’t Aldi, and this isn’t a place you’d go to do your weekly food shop. It’s a tourist attraction, at least in the off-season between filming. It’s a TV set, a place like the Coronation Street cobbles, where you can walk straight onto the location of a hit streaming series and buy souvenirs.
But unlike other TV gift shops – and gift shops in general – you can eat your souvenirs here. The keepsakes from Clarkson’s Farm aren’t keyrings and fridge magnets, tatty posters or photo prints. The items you take away to remember your trip to a television show’s set are all edible.
I saw those potatoes being planted, I saw the honey being collected, I saw the wheat being harvested – and then I left the gift shop with it.
That’s ultimately what you’re paying for: home-grown souvenirs you followed from farm to packet on-screen, with a big Diddly Squat logo on top to keep after.
And it was all lovely to scoff down. The crisps were light and flavourful, not too greasy, not too punchy. The fudge is more like Scottish tablet – very crumbly – and the mouthwatering Bee Juice Bites made a Crunchie seem like hard, cheapy trash by comparison.
In all, was it worth £53? I probably could have cut my spend down a bit, but for some tasty farm shop food and a record-breaking TV series souvenirs rolled into one, I’m happy that I got what I paid for.
What Jeremy Clarkson said about his Diddly Squat Farm shop prices:
Jeremy responded to criticism of his farm shop’s pricing in his a column for The Sun where he highlighted how supermarket pricing affects the farming industry. He said: “An idiotic story appeared this week which said that food in my farm shop costs a lot more than it does in the nearby branch of Aldi.
“Yes. It does. Because I charge customers what it costs to grow and prepare the food, rather than selling it for what the supermarkets are prepared to pay. Which would mean operating at a loss. The problem of supplying supermarkets is now so severe that many farmers are saving their money and not growing anything at all.”
Have you visited Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm shop? Let us know in the comment section below.
