Dartington Trust is a charitable trust that two years ago was on the brink of going bust.

It’s accounts showed an operating loss of £4.53m and although it was much loved and appreciated by its users, it wasn’t paying its way.

Chief Operations Officer Nick Harris (36) has a background working with country estates as he explained:

“I'm horticulturally trained from Berkshire College of Agriculture starting my career as a horticulturalist on a private estate in Oxfordshire.

“Alongside that I spent six years as a retained firefighter.

“I moved into a more senior role for a private school in Buckinghamshire where I became the Premises Manager overseeing the gardens, the grounds, and this was a Capability Brown parkland, it was a listed, registered park and garden.

Nick then progressed to a private estate in Oxfordshire becoming Estate Manager before he and his wife decided to move to Devon in 2019.

He became Grounds Manager for Bicton College, being promoted to Facilities Manager with oversight of four of the Cornwall College Group’s campuses.

Two years later and CEO Robert Fedder invited him to become Chief Operations Officer for Dartington Estate.

Nick explained he expanded his role into tenancies:

“I've got a fantastic team on the tenants team, still oversight of the maintenance.

“There's 80 buildings on the estate, over half of which are listed, and that's every style of listing.

So what do they have planned for the future?: “

“We want to ensure all the spaces are filled by people who are the best at what they do and create a community of collaboration.

“We have a over 200 businesses on the estate, a split of 165 office commercial tenants and over 40 land tenants so that's everyone from our tenant farmer who occupies 400 acres of the estate with his dairy farm to LandWorks who work with current and ex- inmates from local prisons.

“The number has grown from 57 per cent occupancy across the estate in 2023 to just under 95 per cent now in 2025.

In terms of available space, there is still a lot of space to be filled up.

“We've got a number of dilapidated buildings which we plan to bring back to a usable state.

It's about finding the best partners that are the best at what they do and that could be the Green Table Cafe, it could be My Golf, the gym, or it could be a larger development project.

We've got the new SEND school in Redwood River School who are very busy getting themselves set up to open in January of 2026.

“We have ANPR cameras on each car park and know exactly how many vehicles have come on and off the estate by entering our car parks in one year.

“In 2023 that number was about 37,500 vehicles and by 2025, in the same time period, that had gone up to about 150,000 vehicles.”

My long-standing vision for the estate is that it is a not only a kind of a microclimate where everybody can gain something from one another but also it's a hub that you know not just local people but people from further afield be that nationally internationally can come and gain something and have an amazing day out or an overnight stay.