Britain’s Got Talent Winner’s plan to diversify his Dorset farm and build a rural wellness community hub

From arable and storage to Britain's Got Talent: The Chick family's history of farm diversification

Ben Chick grew up on Manor Farm in Sixpenny Handley, four hundred hectares of chalk downland on the Dorset Wiltshire border, in the Cranborne Chase National Landscape between Blandford Forum and Salisbury. It has been farmed by three generations of his family.

It is also a farm that has never stood still. When dairy margins collapsed in the 1990s, the family pivoted entirely to arable. A self storage operation has since been added alongside the core business. Change, here, is part of the farm.

2025 tested that resilience. Ben spent the year managing chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition he still lives with, while trying to keep on top of the farm. It was in the middle of that struggle that he joined the Hawkstone Farmers Choir, a group of farmers from across the UK originally brought together to front an advertising campaign for Jeremy Clarkson’s lager. What began as a distraction became, in his own words, a lifeline.

What followed was a chain of events nobody could have predicted, culminating in a Britain’s Got Talent win. Off the back of it, Ben is now aiming to diversify the farm further, future proof the business, and build something the wider community can be part of.

The Hawkstone Farmers Choir’s road to Britain’s Got Talent

The Hawkstone Farmers Choir was never supposed to be a talent show act. Thirty four farmers from across the UK were brought together to front an advertising campaign for Jeremy Clarkson’s lager, Hawkstone.

Ben joined at a point when he needed it more than he perhaps realised. Managing chronic fatigue syndrome while running a 400 hectare farm is isolating in a way that’s familiar to a lot of people in agriculture, even if it’s rarely spoken about. The choir gave him something to look forward to each week, and a group of people who understood the pressures of the job without him having to explain them.

What happened next surprised everyone involved, Ben included. A semi final performance of Bastille’s Pompeii earned a standing ovation and won the public vote, with Simon Cowell calling it one of the most beautiful productions the show had produced in years. On the 30th of May, the choir walked onto the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo and won the competition outright.

Since then, the choir have taken on an informal role as mental health ambassadors within farming, a part of the story that clearly means as much to Ben as the win itself. There are early plans being drawn up for what comes next, including recordings, though Ben is candid that he doesn’t yet know exactly what shape that will take.

What he does know is that the experience changed how he thinks about community. And that thinking has gone on to shape what he’s now planning back home in Dorset.

Chalk & Padel: planning Dorset’s first rural indoor padel club

Most people who reach a Britain’s Got Talent final are chasing a moment. Ben was chasing that too, but his mind was also on Dorset Council, and the 500 odd decisions still waiting for him back home.

The application for Chalk & Padel, a proposed indoor padel club at Thorneydown Farm, has been validated by Dorset Council and is moving through the formal planning process, with members of the public already submitting their representations. Asked which of those decisions has been hardest so far, Ben pauses before settling, tentatively, on design.

It’s not hard to see why. The site sits on the edge of Sixpenny Handley, within the Cranborne Chase National Landscape. Anything built here has to earn its place in a protected landscape, not just function within it. Rather than the standard padel warehouse look, the plans lean into rural architecture and natural materials, a building meant to belong to the chalk downland around it, not interrupt it.

The choice of sport itself is more straightforward. Padel is currently Britain’s fastest growing racket sport. According to the Lawn Tennis Association, the number of players nationally has grown from around 15,000 in 2019 to roughly one million today, across 1,825 courts. Despite that growth, north, central and west Dorset remain without a single court of their own, with existing facilities concentrated around Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. If approved, Chalk & Padel would be the first venue of its kind serving Blandford Forum, Shaftesbury, Sturminster Newton, Wimborne, Salisbury and the surrounding villages.

But padel is really just the anchor. The wider vision draws heavily on New Zealand design and hospitality culture, a connection that traces back to Ben’s partner, who is from New Zealand, and time he’s spent there with her. It’s clearly more than an aesthetic borrowing. He describes it less as a design choice and more as a company culture he wants to build, one rooted in the warmth he experienced first hand. Aroha Coffee, the planned specialty café, takes its name from the Māori word for love. Alongside it sit changing rooms and a sauna and cold plunge pool, reformer Pilates and yoga, breathwork and other restorative practices.

Each of these has come from somewhere personal. Managing chronic fatigue syndrome has meant finding tools that actually work, and Ben says these are the ones that have helped him most in his own recovery. Building them into Chalk & Padel isn’t just a wellness trend he’s following. It’s a set of practices he’s lived with and trusts.

“It’s easy to throw wellness around as a buzzword,” he admits. “But for me it’s genuine. It’s about building real community and turning my experience around to help others.”

That community ambition runs through nearly every part of the plan. If approved, corporate away days are pencilled in as a midweek revenue stream. Come the weekend, Ben, a keen DJ in his own right, is hoping to run DJ nights every Friday between 7pm and 10pm.

“So the most important question of the day,” I ask him, “have you managed to lock in a good price for lager and cider from Jeremy yet?”

Ben laughs and admits it’s the best question of the interview so far. No doubt there are conversations still to be had.

Behind the personality, though, sits a genuinely serious operator. Ben describes farming as having given him a grounding in financial discipline and resilience that’s proving directly transferable to building a hospitality business from scratch. Much of what he’s learned has been self taught, and he’s candid that he’s enjoying the process of understanding every part of the business as it comes together. He’s equally candid about where his interest runs out: tax and HMRC are, by his own admission, not for him. His mother already handles that side of things, and Ben knows that as the business grows, learning to delegate further will be part of the job too.

A founding membership waitlist, capped at 50 members, is already open. Subject to planning approval, the hope is to open in late 2026 or early 2027.

What’s next for Chalk & Padel and the Hawkstone Farmers Choir

For now, both stories, the choir’s and the farm’s, remain unfinished.

There’s talk of recordings for the Hawkstone Farmers Choir, though Ben is honest that nobody quite knows what shape that will take yet. What’s certain is that the group has become something more than a one off television moment. Their role as informal mental health ambassadors within farming feels, if anything, like the more lasting legacy of the whole experience.

Back in Sixpenny Handley, the wait continues. Dorset Council’s decision on Chalk & Padel will determine whether three padel courts, a Kiwi café and a sauna actually take shape on the edge of a working arable farm, or whether Ben goes back to the drawing board. Either way, the instinct behind it isn’t going anywhere. Manor Farm has reinvented itself before, through the dairy crisis of the 1990s and the slow build of a self storage business since. Ben is simply the latest generation doing what the Chick family has always done: looking at what they’ve got, and asking what else it could become.

If the application is approved, Chalk & Padel hopes to open in late 2026 or early 2027. If you’d like to follow the Ben’s journey, Chalk & Padel are posting updates at:

Instagram @chalkandpadel

LinkedIn: Ben Chick