Our Story
From a farmhouse on the Norfolk-Suffolk border to four London shops. Twenty-nine years, three generations, and a lot of chickens
Wyndham House 1997
Lee and Lin Mullett founded Wyndhams in 1997. Between them, they had thirty years of experience in the poultry industry, and they'd reached the same conclusion at the same time: there was a better way to do this.
The way most chicken got produced in the late nineties wasn't right. It still mostly isn't. The birds were fast-grown, intensively raised, treated as a unit cost rather than an animal. Lee and Lin wanted to do the opposite. Slow-grown, true free range, drug-free, additive-free chickens, raised on a working farmhouse on the Norfolk-Suffolk border.
The farmhouse was called Wyndham House. That's where the name came from. We've been Wyndhams ever since.
They quickly became one of the pioneers of free range English chicken farming. The first customers were chefs and food-conscious shoppers who knew the difference and were willing to pay for it. Within two years, the business was ready for its next step.
Borough Market 1999
Borough Market in 1999 was a working market. The wholesale side was still the main event, with chefs and restaurant owners coming through in the early hours to choose their own stock from the people who actually produced it. The retail market traded weekly on Saturdays, and Wyndhams joined as one of the founding traders at the first weekly market.
Lee opened the stall on his own. A small stand, chickens reared on the family farm, driven down through the night to London Bridge with a young family in tow. Some mornings the family came too. The whole Mullett family have spent more Saturday mornings at Borough than they could count.
Twenty-five years later, we're still there. The stall has moved a few times within the market. First on Stoney Street, then a second site on Bedale Street for hot food, and eventually consolidated into the bigger Bedale Street unit selling both raw and cooked from one stand. Charlotte runs the team now, six days a week, and the chicken wraps that became a Borough signature didn't even exist on day one.
From farm to butcher's
Wyndhams started as a chicken farm. We're not one anymore.
At some point, every business has to choose what it wants to be. By the mid-2000s, the supply of true free range chicken in the UK had grown. There were now other excellent producers doing what we'd been doing on our own. The retail side of Wyndhams was growing fast. Borough Market was thriving. We made a decision: we'd stop producing our own chickens and put everything into being the best butcher's we could be.
We've never regretted it. The producers we now buy chicken from are some of the finest in the country. The same goes for the beef, lamb, pork, game and speciality meat we've added to the range over the years. Every farm we work with is small, careful, and known to us by name.
Wyndham House is no longer a chicken farm. But everything we sell still answers to the same standard the farm started with.
What hasn't changed
We're a different business than the one Lee and Lin started in 1997. The farm is gone. The range is bigger. The team is wider. The shops are spread across London rather than tucked on a Norfolk farmhouse driveway.
But the principles haven't moved. True free range over the easy version. Real producers we know by name. Knowledge across the counter. The kind of food you'd cook for someone you love.
Twenty-nine years in, we're still here. And there's still a lot of cooking left to do.
OUR LONDON LOCATIONS
With 4 locations from Central to West London, each location has its own charm complimenting its suroundings.
