‘Everything you see has been built by us,” Toti Gifford informs me with a sweep of his arms. I’m being shown around Fennells Farm in Gloucestershire, home to the much-loved Giffords Circus since 2014, with the company deep in rehearsals for its latest production, Waterfield. There’s an awful lot to see. The landscape is green and lush and scattered with livestock, with the site still functioning as a farm and brewery. The company headquarters sits inside a huge repurposed cattle shed and the farm is peppered with makeshift barns, all built by hand and rammed with props, paints and all manner of circus mementoes and mysteries (including, quite brilliantly, a human cannonball).
There’s a new winter venue and a restaurant and hotel under construction, with both scheduled to open over the next few years – the dreaded planning permission pending. The area surrounding the famous circus tent, topped with twinkling lights, has also been spruced up. Sick of wading through mud whenever it rained, Toti Gifford – who also runs a successful landscaping business – decided to dig up the field and replace it entirely with pebbles.
