The Resilience Of Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses

Nearly a century of Lancashire cheesemaking, tested by fire and emerging stronger.

On the evening of Monday, November 6, 2023, Matthew Hall was fast asleep when his mother began throwing stones at his bedroom window. Outside, the Lancashire night sky was lit not by stars, but by a blaze consuming Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses’ office and packing site in Longridge.

"Mum told me there was a fire," he recalls. "That word can mean so much, can't it? You light your fire in your house; you have fire on a candle. But this was not a fire. This was a blaze. Straight away, your legs go to jelly. It's all a little overwhelming, looking at the place you love so much in flames."

What Matthew saw that night was its site on Shay Lane, Longridge, being consumed by an inferno. It took 60 firefighters to bring the flames under control with crews on site for nearly a week. A warehouse the size of two football pitches was destroyed. Hundreds of tonnes of stock, cheese in maturation, cheese being prepared for despatch, the result of months of skilled, patient craft, was gone. Six weeks before Christmas.

It was, by any measure, a catastrophe. What followed was a masterclass in resilience, family, and a refusal to be defined by disaster.

Richard and Annie's Farm

The story of Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses begins in the fields of rural Lancashire in 1932, when Richard and Annie Butler purchased Lower Barker Farm in Inglewhite. From the very beginning, the farm was given over to cheese, handmade, carefully crafted, and sold locally to neighbours who recognised quality when they tasted it.

Richard and Annie built something that would outlast them by generations. All four of their sons came to work in the family business, and cheesemaking rooted itself deep in the family's identity. The name Blacksticks, which would eventually become the business's most celebrated brand, came from a collection of tall chestnut trees on the Goosnargh-Chipping border, the name of the farm owned by one of the founders' four sons.

The second generation nurtured what Richard and Annie had started. Jean Butler, now 87 and the last surviving member of that generation, remains a living link to those earliest days. When King Charles III visited the new Butlers cheese campus in February 2026 to officially open it, he sat with Jean, reviewed historical records, and listened as she recounted stories from nearly a century of cheesemaking history.

The third generation expanded the business further. Gillian and Colin Hall, Gillian being the daughter of the Butler family, broadened the range and built the commercial foundations that would eventually take Butlers cheeses into supermarkets and delis across the country.

Farmhouse Cheesemaking Craft

At the heart of Butlers' identity is a commitment to milk, where it comes from, how it is treated, and the effect it has on the quality of the final product. All of the milk used at Inglewhite comes from the family's own herd, with the remainder sourced from farms within a ten-mile radius, many of them operated by family relatives. In an age when food provenance is increasingly important to consumers, Butlers has practised what it preached since 1932.

The cheeses are made by hand, using traditional methods handed down through the generations. The range spans hard, blue, and soft cheese in cow’s, goat’s and sheep’s milk, with everything from classic Lancashire cheese to those inspired by those on the continent.

The flagship is undoubtedly Blacksticks Blue. Distinctive for its distinctive orange colour, a result of the annatto natural colouring added to the milk, it is matured for eight weeks, during which time it develops a smooth, creamy texture and a flavour that manages to be both gently tangy and approachably mild. It has been credited as the first contemporary British blue cheese to demonstrate that the country could produce something genuinely exciting beyond Stilton, and it has won admirers at the very highest levels, from celebrated chefs to King Charles, who sampled it with blackcurrant jam on a ginger biscuit during his 2026 campus visit, declaring it something that would be "great as a dessert."

Beyond Blacksticks, Butlers’ range includes Trotter Hill — a crumbly aged Lancashire-style cheese — Kidderton Ash, a delicate goat's cheese dusted with charcoal ash, Parlick, a ewe's milk cheese, and Tunworth, a soft, continental-style cheese revered by Michelin-starred restaurants and independent delicatessens alike.

Following the acquisition of the Hampshire Cheese Company in 2024, Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses is now the largest independent soft cheesemaker in the UK.

Head Cheese Grader Bill Yates, who has worked at Butlers for 36 years, and Head Cheesemaker Tim Fisher, with 35 years of service, are testament to the kind of institutional knowledge and deep craft that no manual can fully replicate, the sort of expertise that can only be accumulated through decades spent honing their craft.

The Night Everything Changed

When the fire broke out at Longridge, the dairy at Inglewhite, a separate site, was spared which meant the cheesemaking itself could continue. But the packing, maturation, and office operations that had been housed at Longridge were entirely destroyed. The company was suddenly making cheese at full capacity with nowhere near the space or infrastructure to store, mature, or despatch it properly.

"We lost the entire operation overnight," says Matthew simply.

Yet within hours of the blaze, the response had already begun. Milk was being turned to cheese within hours, plans were being made, calls were being placed, and the family and workforce were gathering themselves for what lay ahead. The local business community rallied. Customers, including the major supermarket chains, offered patience and support. Operations were moved entirely to the Inglewhite dairy, which meant working in a space a fraction of the size of what had existed before, with milk tankers and cheese wagons making journeys that an integrated site would have made unnecessary.

"Since the loss of Longridge," the company wrote on its website a year after the fire, "we have managed to operate entirely from the dairy, but with limited space we are unable to mature our cheese on site. This means extra wagons to take our cheese to and from the dairy and extra milk tankers, as we are unable to use all our milk."

The financial impact was severe with multi-million-pound losses and the time taken for insurance to come through. And yet, at no point did supply to customers break down entirely. Throughout the rebuild, Butlers maintained continuity of supply, an achievement that, given the circumstances, amounts to something close to a minor miracle of logistics and willpower.

Building the Cheese Campus

From the very beginning of the crisis, the family took a decision that would come to define the next chapter of Butlers' story. This would not simply be a case of rebuilding what had been lost.

"Cheesemaking is at the very heart of our business," said Matthew. "Operating entirely from the dairy was not without its challenges, but it ignited our desire to nurture our cheese from beginning to end on the farm."

"We saw an opportunity to not simply replace what we lost, but to build something that would serve our business and our community for the next 100 years. This generational investment in our new cheese campus brings tradition and technology together to protect our craft now, and in future."

"In the summer following the fire, Butlers entered into discussions with Preston City Council about an entirely new vision: a purpose-built cheese campus at Wilson Fields Farm, Inglewhite, the home of the original dairy, that would bring every stage of production under one roof for the first time in the company's history. Planning permission was granted in early 2025. The investment would total £15 million.

The campus was designed in harmony with the surrounding countryside, largely invisible from the road, its building footprint kept deliberately modest, its materials and architecture grounded in the agricultural landscape of rural Lancashire. Crucially, 80% of the construction work was carried out by local Lancashire businesses. The rubble from the Longridge fire site was transported to Inglewhite and used to create the connecting pathways between buildings, a detail of striking symbolic power: the destruction of one chapter becoming, quite literally, the foundation of the next.

The centrepiece of the new campus is a state-of-the-art maturation shed, specifically designed to meet the individual needs of Butlers' three distinct cheese categories, hard, blue, and soft, which require markedly different conditions of humidity, temperature, and airflow. The shed can hold up to 130,000 individual cheeses at any one time. The campus also includes new cheesemaking facilities, a product development area, and offices, all interlinked by those paths made from Longridge rubble.

Alongside its traditional cheesemaking techniques that have been passed down through the generations, the campus incorporates modern systems, technologies and data-led insights that help Butlers optimise production, maturation and quality while preserving the craftsmanship that sits at the heart of the business.

The sustainability credentials of the new campus are substantial. By consolidating all operations onto a single site, Butlers has reduced its road traffic and food miles by approximately 50% compared to operating across two locations. Pre-fire, milk, cheese, and staff were travelling between Longridge and Inglewhite constantly; at the new campus, the journey from family herd to finished, packaged product takes place within the boundaries of the farm.

A Royal Seal of Approval

On 10th February 2026, King Charles III visited Inglewhite to officially open Butlers’ new cheese campus. He toured the facilities in the company of three generations of the family, Jean Butler, Gillian Hall, Matthew and Daniel Hall, as well as Bill Yates and Tim Fisher, and a gathering of the farmers, suppliers, contractors, and customers who had helped make the rebuild possible.

The Mayor of Preston, Councillor Sue Whittam, who attended the opening, described the occasion with evident pride: "After a devastating fire two years ago, the family-owned business has focused on rebuilding with sustainability at its heart. The King was very impressed with the new state-of-the-art facilities."

On his departure, the King offered a verdict that Matthew will likely carry with him for the rest of his life: Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses was, His Majesty remarked, "an exceptional family business."

The Fourth Generation — and the Fifth

Matthew, 35, studied business management at Lancaster University before working in marketing at Sara Lee and then Bel UK. He returned to the family business and now leads it as Commercial Director, alongside his brother Daniel. The fourth generation has brought with it an appetite for innovation that sits alongside deep respect for the traditions from which the business grew.

Under Matthew and Daniel's stewardship, the business has increasingly focused on making farmhouse cheese more discoverable and accessible to a new generation of consumers.

While respecting the traditions that have defined Butlers for nearly a century, they have challenged some of the cheese category's long-held conventions. From positioning Blacksticks Blue as an everyday cheese rather than a cheeseboard or Christmas purchase, to experimenting with new formats, pairings and usage occasions, the aim has been to encourage more people to explore the breadth and versatility of British farmhouse cheese, more often.

"We've got very strong foundations, a rich history, and a product that's well-known nationally and internationally, which brings us a whole set of opportunities to build on,” says Matthew.

“Now, we're looking to turbocharge the British cheese revolution without having to start from the ground up again.”

That phrase carries a particular resonance given everything the family has been through. They did, in a very real sense, have to start from the ground up, or at least, they had the option to. They chose instead to use the catastrophe as a catalyst for something more ambitious than anything they had previously imagined.

As for the fifth generation, Matthew, married with three young children, is philosophical rather than prescriptive. "There will be no pressure on the fifth generation," he has said. But given the depth of the family's roots in this craft and this landscape and given what the fourth generation has just built from the wreckage of a November fire, it is difficult to imagine the story ending here.

A Lancashire Institution

Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses has been making cheese in Inglewhite for nearly a century. It has survived wars, agricultural upheaval, the industrialisation of food production, and a blaze that would have ended many businesses overnight. It supplies all the major supermarket chains alongside independent retailers and Michelin-starred kitchens. It is a Made in Lancashire ambassador, a holder of multiple national and international awards, and now, officially, a recipient of a royal seal of approval.

Today, Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses has entered the next chapter of its story. With foundations rooted in family, farming and cheesemaking craft, the business is firmly focused on the future and unlocking the full potential of its new cheese campus.

By marrying tradition with technology, Butlers is protecting its craft for future generations while introducing British speciality cheese to a new generation of consumers. Richard and Annie Butler would, one suspects, find the new cheese campus rather extraordinary.

But they would recognise, in every wheel and round and truckle that leaves it, exactly what they started all those years ago.

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Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses is based at Wilson Fields Farm, Inglewhite, Lancashire. The range is available from major supermarkets, independent retailers, and at butlerscheeses.co.uk.