Tulley’s Farm – an events business for all the seasons

Tulley’s new Christmas Light Festival is the latest hit for a hugely diversified farm

Oxbury has helped to bring festive cheer for visitors to Tulley’s Farm in Crawley this Christmas. 

The farm has evolved enormously since it was established in the 1930s and is now a multi-seasonal events business. 

Already home to popular attractions like an Escape Rooms experience, a Halloween Shocktoberfest, pumpkin picking, a tulip festival and a Santa village, the farm is building on its festive offering this Christmas with the launch of a spectacular Light Festival. 

Visitors can explore ten differently themed displays, from the romantic Lovers’ Lane to the thrilling Fire & Ice show.   

Events of one sort or another have been a staple of Tulley’s Farm for 30 years but, this year, they’ve really stepped it up a notch by capturing the attention of the Instagram generation, looking for that perfect backdrop. 

This year’s Tulip Festival was the first of its kind anywhere in the UK and exceeded all expectations, with nearly 95,000 people through the gates beating their initial estimate of 12,000. The Light Festival offers similar ‘Insta’ potential and an invited crowd of influencers in the opening weeks has helped to make the show go viral. 

Tulley’s is not your usual farm. Purchased shortly before the Second World War by Bernard Beare – part of a family of agricultural engineers who had moved to Sussex from Devon – the farm started out helping the war effort. 

“He was a smallholder, really,” explains Bernard’s grandson Stuart Beare, the current owner of the farm and CEO of Tulley’s Entertainment Group. “All farms at that time were ploughed up for the war effort and my grandfather ended up supplying army canteens with anything that could be pickled, really. After the war, he won some contracts to do the same thing for some large pickling companies and it went from there with a successful market garden.” 

Every generation has brought its own innovation. Stuart’s mum and dad caught on to the deep freeze boom of the 1970s – “Everyone had these big chest freezers in the garage and were looking for food to fill them with” – by opening up to the public as a pick-your-own farm.  

Stuart’s first contribution when he joined the business in 1991 was to open a farm shop. “It was the kind of thing a lot of pick-your-own farms were doing around that time but we soon realised that, being out in the sticks, we needed something else to bring people here.” 

The events business was born, starting with tasting days for the farm produce, a maize maze and introducing a pumpkin festival which expanded into Tulley’s ‘world-famous’ Shocktoberfest.  

“Before long, we got to the stage where the events were overtaking the farm shop. People coming for a bottle of milk were having to park two fields away because of all the crowds here for one of our events,” explains Stuart. 

“So we decided to close the farm shop and concentrate on what we were really good at.” 

The entrepreneurial nature of the business has proved to be a natural fit for Oxbury. When the family needed to purchase additional land for parking for their tens of thousands of visitors a few years ago, it was too unusual a request for other banks’ agricultural lending teams. 

But after reviewing the success of previous events, Oxbury could see they had a compelling business case and were confident about what the family were aiming to achieve. 

And Oxbury’s Flexi Credit product has also proved to be a perfect fit for the Tulley’s Farm business model.  

“Tulley’s is an incredibly seasonal business,” explains Finance Director Jacqueline Berryman. “And we have a lot of up-front costs – for example all the tulip bulbs had to be bought the year before the event and we’ve had to buy all the equipment for the Light Festival. But Oxbury’s Flexi Credit means we can borrow that money when we need it and pay it back from ticket sales, rather than having to take out long-term loans, and that’s made a big difference.” 

A creative flair and a love of theatre have given Stuart the tools to create these fantastic experiences. But inspiration often comes from the United States. 

“In 1998, I went to visit an event of the North American Farmers Direct Marketing Association, and it just opened my eyes. American farms do a lot of events but they’re usually restricted to spring and autumn because it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.” 

Now Stuart and his son Sam – Operations Manager of the business and the fourth generation involved in Tulley’s Farm – try to make the trip every year. “We just take the lead from what they are doing in the States and adapt it for the UK market. We first saw the tulip festival in Chicago and decided to try it here. It was a risk, but it has proved enormously successful.” 

The business is dedicated to delivering an exceptional visitor experience, consistently maintaining high standards while staying focused on innovation.  

“We’ve got the best Escape Rooms in the country, there’s nothing else like Shocktoberfest, and the Tulip Festival was a great success,’ says Stuart proudly. “The difference with the Light Festival is that we were first to market with all the other events, but there are lots of other Christmas light festivals. So we need this to be world-class.” 

As you see the flashing strobe lights reflecting around the smoky waters of the Northern Star exhibit, or you look across the site from the top of the 30m Ferris wheel, it looks like they’ve hit the mark again.