Breaks Fold Farm, Harrogate: How Alex Polizzi from The Hotel Inspector helped revive Yorkshire farming and camping business

Following Breaks Fold Farm’s appearance on The Hotel Inspector the owner has made changes to help revive her camping business.

Richard Pullan’s, 49, family have been farming on Breaks Fold Farm for more than 150 years and he is now the fourth generation to run the farm, which is predominantly breeding traditional Swaledale, Herdwick and Mule lambs.

Breaks Fold Farm is located in the village of West End and 10 years ago due to the unprecedented challenges faced by British farming, Richard and his wife Louise have had to diversify their business into a campsite.

Over the years, the camping side of the business flourished until new difficulties arose during the Covid-19 pandemic.

While they weren’t the usual candidate for The Hotel Inspector, they were selected to be on the show and the episode aired in May 2026.

“Alex Polizzi is a really lovely person who genuinely just wants businesses to succeed,” Louise said.

“She's got a wealth of knowledge and it was an opportunity not to be passed up on to be able to take her perspective on our business, even though we probably weren't the usual candidate for the programme.

“It really was a pleasure working with Alex and her team.”

Most businesses on The Hotel Inspector are hotels that need renovating or an overhaul, but Louise, from Guiseley, said that they are not the typical business you see on the show.

“We have in our own right been successful and it was outside factors which were causing us problems as opposed to us being shabby or run down as it would be,” she said.

“We lost part of our business through COVID which hit us really hard because obviously we'd put a lot of money and a lot of time into it.

“To lose that was fairly disheartening and then Richard had an accident in May 2023 which then put a lot of pressure on me to run the business on my own.

“You become a bit tired and lost sometimes especially in small business. So Alex came in to have a look at what we can do with what we've got because what we have is available for the little site in a really nice rural location.”

There are some pieces of advice and suggestions that The Hotel Inspector presenter Alex Polizzi shared with Richard, from Nidderdale, and Louise about how to boost their businesses.

“I think the best advice she gave us was to shut the door on the things that aren't working or move on from the past,” she said.

“You can't let that define what's going to make the future of your business and that has made a massive change to us both, definitely.

“The self-check-ins made a massive difference to us because we wasted so much time sitting around waiting for people to turn up and now we can utilise that time on the farm and we're always around somewhere.

“It’s a bit more of a relaxed thing; we wanted to have more of a sort of European feel and some people still need help and that's fine because we're always around.

“We've implemented that on the shepherd's huts and on the camping as well and then the other changes she suggested was offering additional breakfast items and we've offered those as additional extras for people to be able to [enjoy] as well.”

The reaction following the episode has been positive, Louise said.

“I was actually quite taken aback by all the lovely feedback we've had, like comments on social media and we've had some lovely emails,” she said.

“I've had people turning up to tell me how great we are and that is really quite heartwarming that people think so highly of me and Richard.

“It does mean an awful lot to us, we've put a lot into this place over the last year. Richard took over in 2008. We're approaching 20 years now.

“We’ve got more [visitors] and there's definitely been more people visiting the website and looking us up.

“It's really difficult as a farm to survive and having to diversify. If we can just highlight that a little bit and show people a different side to farming then that's always a good thing as far as I'm concerned.”

Wildlife conservation is important to Richard and Louise when it comes to their farming and the camping business.

“We do a lot of conservation work for strange things, maybe like fungi is one that we've been doing a bit of work on this year, and work quite closely with the Nidderdale National Landscapes,” Louise said.

“We are very passionate about the ground nesting birds and protecting the wildlife on the farm.

“The farming is still traditional, that is low input so not putting loads of things like fertiliser on because obviously we're quite restricted by a water catchment zone where we farm at the moment.”

The couple are passionate about looking after the environment and Louise said it’s the wildlife that make the location unique.

“We are just a small site, so we do have non-electric pitches and electric pitches and we have really nice modern toilet and shower facilities,” she said.

“What's unique about our location is the birds; you can literally sit in a field and hear a pin drop here because it's such a focused environment.

“That is the main driving factor of what we do is we want people to come and immerse themselves in the beautiful Washburn Valley.”

“Richard’s family have farmed the land for a long time and there's quite a lot of deep ties to the area across both sides of his family.

“It's predominantly like a hill farm, so it's quite a tough location. We're a thousand feet above sea level. We're just getting back into that now, but it's a very environmentally focused farm.”