B4 Business Magazine - Your Guide to business in Oxford

Welcome to Issue 14 of B4 Magazine

B4 Magazine is your guide to Business in Oxford. With features on Businesses, Networking, Money, Finance, Marketing, Conference Venues, News, Law, Events, Reviews, Interviews and Leisure.

Hope For Networkers Everywhere

B4 has been delighted to learn of a group of local businesses, networking and working together to turn a simple property refurbishment project into a luxury boutique hotel receiving rave reviews. B4’s Richard Rosser has been talking to the key players from Hope House, Jill Treloggen Interiors, Penny and Sinclair, NewTrim, and Deborah Reynolds Soft Furnishings, to find out how the project came to fruition in the heart of Woodstock.

B4 is all about businesses working together, recommendations and raising the profile of local businesses to enable them to win business. The project at Hope House epitomises all that B4 stands for.

Hope House, a Grade II* listed building, was built circa 1708 for maltster Miles Parker, a local councillor and mayor of Woodstock from 1711-1715, who, as Receiver General of Taxes in Oxfordshire, collected the taxes to pay for Blenheim Palace.

Constructed at the same time as Blenheim Palace, Hope House is one of two grand houses in Woodstock designed in Vanbrughian style with baroque architecture, and it is easy to understand why it has been described as a sister property to the Vanbrugh-designed Blenheim Palace, as Paul explains. “There is much debate as to whether the house was indeed designed by Vanbrugh himself, as there are many similarities in the style. The stone is from the same source – you would have to ask the Blenheim site manager how it got here!”

Paul has spent all of his life working in the hospitality industry, most recently as owner and operator of the Fardell Group of Hotels, where he ran an acclaimed restaurant, and prior to that, as a General Manager opening hotels for the Oberoi Group in the Far East between 1994 and 1999.

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Feeling Blue?

Five years ago, Witney MP and Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, helped launch The Witney Big(ger) Breakfast Club, Witney’s foremost business networking organisation. Mr Cameron recently returned to Witney’s Masonic Hall to help the club celebrate its 5th Birthday Party, where he delivered a rousing speech prior to answering members’ questions and, afterwards, a selection of questions put to him by B4’s Richard Rosser.

Sharing anecdotes which include the likes of Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow on the one hand, and distressed children at the annual Combe School Christmas card competition on the other – the child in question was apparently devastated that Mr Cameron wasn’t the ‘star’ name he had hoped for – Mr Cameron demonstrated that he does possess an abundance of natural wit and humour.

Using the five year celebration of The Witney Big(ger) Breakfast as a stimulant, Mr Cameron was keen to see what lessons could be learned to help us all get through what will undoubtedly be a difficult year ahead.

“What I would like, most of all, today is to hear your questions and try and answer your points about the small business environment. It has been, and still is, an extremely difficult world we live in. If you look back over the last five years, I think we should have learned a very important lesson about our economy, a very important lesson about our public services and a very important lesson about our society.

“With regards to the economy, we should by now have learned that you should never expect the good times to last forever. It is biblically simple. You should put aside money for a rainy day. With a 14% budget deficit, twice as big as Dennis Healey had in 1976, we went into the recession not having put aside money after ten very good years. I think that is the biggest lesson I have learned.