At the heart of local life

Environment, Sustainability and Conservation

The estate has been the recipient of three Maldon District Council Conservation and Design awards for Sustainability to date. The first in Dec 2010 winner for the installation of the biomass boiler and highly commended in 2011 with the Construction of the Cookery School along with the overall winner of the 2011 Maldon District Council Building Conservation Award for our restoration of the Hermitage.

The estate is fully engaged with a number of stakeholders in achieving our stewardship goals. We are committed to increasing public access to Braxted Park, particularly to promote the education of young and urban-based people about the value that country estates such as ours contribute to society.

Initiatives include visits to Braxted Park by students from local schools and colleges, as well as heritage groups. We are incredibly proud of the educational opportunities we provide and welcome visits by prior arrangement.

We are also extremely active with charities, offering our venue and facilities to various good causes. These include golf days, charity balls, parish walks, open gardens and tea days. In addition, the venue is often hired on a commercial but subsidised basis, by charities that raise substantial sums through their events.

Let's Talk Trash festival 2024

Braxted Park hosted 300 students at the trailblazing ‘Let’s Talk Trash’ festival in July, in a bid to shift behavioural changes towards littering.

In collaboration with Maldon District Council, Essex County Council and Plume Academy, Braxted Park Estate hosted the region’s first ‘Let’s Talk Trash’ Festival on Tuesday 18th July. Over 300 students aged 11-13 flocked to the grounds of the estate to take part in a number of exciting and engaging activities designed to shift behavioural change around littering, raise awareness of the environmental impacts and encourage the next generation to become changemakers.

For more information enquire here at alex@braxtedpark.com

Learn more about the festival

Land Use and Management

Braxted Park Estate has been rethinking its approach to land use and management for over two decades. It has sought to develop an Estate that contributes to biodiversity improvement and climate resilience through nature-led solutions that complement other Estate enterprises, which in turn can help fund and sustain more extensive land use, thereby ensuring true long-term sustainability.

This Environmental Strategy shares an ambitious environmental vision and sets out opportunities to bring about landscape-scale nature recovery, conservation of heritage features and enhancement of community benefits. This Strategy recommends actions for Braxted Park Estate to realise their environmental goals and ambitions from 2023-33, which sit within four focus areas: biodiversity, carbon, heritage and community.

Braxted Park Estate will work in partnership with key stakeholders including Operation Turtle Dove, RSPB, Bidwells and the local farm cluster to enhance the Estate’s ecosystem services to maximise benefits for nature and local communities. The project aims to demonstrate a novel approach to the land management to improve ecological value, and the quality and sustainability of ecosystem services.

Download our environmental strategy PDF

Heritage & Conservation

We are extremely proud of our heritage and ongoing work in the areas of conservation, sustainability, the environment and public policy.

With the help of English Heritage, the Country House Foundation, Maldon District Council and DEFRA, we are engaged in a comprehensive programme of projects to preserve the heritage of the Braxted Park Estate and conserve its parkland. This includes:

The restoration of Braxted Park, which is a Grade II* listed park and garden on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. This includes a Landscape Restoration Plan produced by the Elizabeth Banks Association in May 1993, which has been executed within the annual capital works programme of the present Environmental Stewardship Scheme and the Countryside Stewardship Scheme for 10 years before that.
The ongoing restoration and maintenance of the Grade II* listed Georgian house, including the signature octagonal windows, the roof and the exterior brickwork
The restoration of the Grade II* listed hermitage which was listed as a “Building at Risk” on the English Heritage Register
The restoration of the historic greenhouses within the Grade II listed walled garden to fully functional fruit tree houses
In 2016, the restoration of the four and a half mile wall surrounding the park, along with the restoration of the dam wall at the west end of the main lake, was created from an enabling development project with Maldon County Council.

The Hermitage

The Hermitage at Braxted Park, formerly known, inaccurately, as the Ice House, is one of the most mysterious and enigmatic lakeside buildings in any English parkland setting. Architectural and garden historians are perplexed by its origins and rarely can agree on its original function. The best guess is that it was some sort of “folly” probably originally commissioned by the first Peter DuCane when he built Braxted Park with Sir Robert Taylor in the late 18th century.

During the 1980’s deterioration caused by tree roots pulling the foundations this way and that really set in. Movement was unsustainable and the building half collapsed. It has been a Building at Risk on English Heritage’s register for several decades. It was unsafe and closed to the public. Restoration costs were prohibitive and there it lay discarded and neglected by all except a decent bat population who liked to roost in its nooks and crannies.

Duncan Clark's efforts in securing finance for a complete restoration were eventually successful when English Heritage were persuaded to commission some research on the building’s history which justified funds being extended to help towards the project. Happily, the Country House Foundation supplied the balance of the Funds required, with the Estate making its contribution as well.

In recognition of the excellence of the restoration work, the project was awarded the 2011 Maldon District Council Building Conservation award.

Environment & Sustainability

At the centre of our policy on the environment and sustainability was the completion of the recommendations of a report commissioned by The Carbon Trust in 2009.

A key recommendation of this report was the replacement of the mansion house’s five oil fired boilers with a single 150Kw wood chip boiler to cater for all the heating and hot water needs of the estate year-round.

Fuel for the woodchip burner is sourced from the estate itself using the coppice from ancient semi-natural woodland. This is taken on a thirty year rotation to comply with a woodland management plan compiled by the Essex Woodland Partnership.

In addition to the restoration of the parkland itself, complying with the requirements of the Environmental Stewardship Scheme has resulted in substantial benefits to the environment, including a natural habitat for Barn owls, Door mice, Turtle doves, Nightingales and the extremely rare Hawfinch. Cowslips and Bee Orchids have also made a welcome return to the estate, which is a good indication of the health of the soil. The estate boasts many tens of acres of naturally rewilded areas, that have become semi-mature oak woodlands, planted by Jays and Squirrels. Biodiversity yet again, now occupies a major part of the estate's agricultural strategy, as does becoming a key player in local nature recovery efforts in the Blackwater Estuary, and a cheerleader for the development of farm clusters to encourage biodiversity in the area.

The estate has been the recipient of two Maldon District Council Conservation and Design awards for Sustainability to date. The first in Dec 2010 winner for the installation of the biomass boiler and highly commended in 2011 with the Construction of the Cookery School.

Public Policy

We are also extremely active with charities, offering our venue and facilities to various good causes. These include golf days, charity balls, parish walks, open gardens and tea days.

In addition, the venue is often hired on a commercial but subsidised basis, by charities that raise substantial sums through their events.

What our clients say…

We were looking for somewhere to hold our corporate fun day and the back lawn at Braxted Park was exactly what we had wanted. The planning process was slick and staff were so attentive on the day. Its important that we put on these days and the team made it effortless to bring it all together.
Yellow Events Agency

Our charity ball was amazing! Essex and Herts Air Ambulance need all the support they can get and Alex provided the expertise we needed to put together the most wonderful evening, allowing us to raise vital funds. The staff were so friendly, nothing was too much trouble, and seeing the faces of our guests as they entered The Pavilion was a delight!
Essex and Herts Air Ambulance

We wanted a training day that gave our staff a unique hands-on team building activity, but needed to combine this with a short training session. Braxted Park, with its beautiful parkland, proved to be the perfect venue for this.
Angela Wagstaff, owner of Allwag Promotions