The clink of glasses and the lapping of the tide was punctuated by giggling toddlers and the slurp of oysters at tables populated by people gently sizzling on a baking day on the Kent seaside.
But James Green, of the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, had the demeanour of a man who had found grit in his mollusc. “I don’t like to use the term but it is nimbyism,” he said. “Why did it become personal? I don’t know really. Because we’re a family business, it’s a relatively small town?”
Green, ۵۸, is the director of the WOFC, a company he inherited from his father and whose roots can be traced back to ۱۷۹۳. He has become embroiled in a battle over his plans for a seafood empire.
The WOFC harvests about ۲m oysters a year from Whitstable’s seabeds, half of which stay on the south coast to be sold in the company’s hotel and the four restaurants it runs on the front.
It is Green’s application to extend the seating of one of those restaurants, the Forge oyster shack, on to a patch of beach used to store boats belonging to members of the Whitstable Yacht Club, that has caused a furore and which he says highlights a national problem.
Green is battling, he says, to grow a business that employs ۲۰۰ people but could take on more, and which has cemented Whitstable’s reputation as “Britain’s Oysteropolis”. The new seating for the Forge would allow visitors to enjoy “half a dozen oysters and a glass of muscadet” on the sand, he said, and offer further reason to visit the town.
In ۱۸۶۵, more than ۱۰۰ boats in Whitstable harvested about ۸۰m oysters for sale at the Billingsgate fish market each year. By the ۱۹۷۰s, overfishing, pollution and the arrival of introduced diseases with imported stock resulted in the collapse of the industry.
Green’s father, Barrie, bought the WOFC in ۱۹۷۶. The company had one employee and was barely functioning. It was Green’s sons, James and Richard, who started the industrial-scale farming of non-native Pacific rock oysters in ۲۰۰۸, helping to make Whitstable’s reputation what it is today. But the Greens had to fight a lengthy and expensive campaign nearly a decade ago for the right to maintain the thousands of metal racks off the beach on which they grow.
The company’s success – it is the owner of a considerable chunk of the town’s beach and its shoreline – has not brought affection. The planning application in June for extra seating space and a pergola for the Forge has already attracted more than ۲۰۰ opposing submissions, including from the Environment Agency which is concerned about the impact on flood defences.
Some Whitstable residents called it “a carbuncle” and a “horrifying visual, physical and commercial intrusion”. “Disastrous,” said another of the intention for the cafe to serve alcohol and seafood to customers’ tables on both sides of the King Charles III coastal path that traces the outline of the coast.
Paul McNally, speaking on behalf of the Whitstable Beach Campaign, a group that was at the vanguard of the attempt to block the metal racks in ۲۰۱۸, said there was no justification for the Forge’s extension on to the beach.
“Our remit, for many years, has been a simple one – to protect the unspoilt nature of Whitstable beach and maintain public access to it. Both of which would be compromised by the current development proposal.”
Green, who spent £۱m on his planning application for the racks, and who unsuccessfully sought a licensing application for a similar extension of the Forge five years ago, detects a “general antipathy” towards his company as well as a lack of realism about the economic challenges facing the area and the UK.
“I think this country has a problem with commercial enterprises and expansion maybe,” he said. “And people don’t like change. Maybe we are perceived as quite a big company in a small town.”
Five years ago, when asked to consider an appeal against Canterbury city council’s rejection of the company’s plans, a district judge noted that Green – an “able and determined businessman who through force of will and personality drives forward his projects to commercial success” – had “generated some public animosity towards him personally”.
Green and his company had become the “source of tension, even open hostility, with some within the local community”, the judge added.
Stuart Heaver, a Green party councillor in Whitstable who opposes the extension plans for the Forge, said it was an unfortunate side to the dispute. “People are highly protective of the beach, and it’s a maritime town,” he said. “It is a close-knit community and people get very excited when people try to alter things.
“I have met James Green a few times, a perfectly sensible and nice fellow, but there is a history in the town of a little bit of friction between the company and local residents.”
Green remains unabashed. The licensing application failed last time in part due to the scale of opposition to it, including fromWhitstable Yacht Club, which leases the beach from the WOFC to store its boats.
This time the club, after being offered a better lease in return for giving up some space, has said it has no objection. “The Whitstable economy is based on tourism, like it or lump it,” said Green. “In this day and age you have to do things that are going to make it somewhere people want to go.
“To me, it is completely bonkers that it shouldn’t be supported. I am not looking to build flats on the beach – it’s decking and a pergola, for fuck’s sake.”
