The largest two-day agricultural show in the region. The hottest June on record. And a stand to run.
In late June, Donald Proctor, Ian McKenzie and Stuart Anderson from our construction team spent the day at the Royal Norfolk Show, supporting Stephen Attridge from RWE on their exhibition stand and talking to visitors about the Norfolk Vanguard offshore wind project.
Why does a wind farm need an agricultural show?
On paper, an offshore wind farm and an agricultural show don’t have much to do with each other. In practice, they overlap almost completely. Norfolk Vanguard is two projects, Vanguard West and Vanguard East, with turbines that will sit roughly 50 to 80 kilometres out in the North Sea. But the electricity they generate comes ashore through a 60-kilometre onshore cable route that crosses Norfolk farmland. Onshore construction is already underway, offshore work is due to begin in 2027, and each project will generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of around 1.5 million homes.
Which means the people with the biggest stake in how the project is delivered are not in boardrooms. They are farming the land the cable route passes through. And in the last week of June, a good number of them were among the 80,000 visitors at the Norfolk Showground. If you want to talk to the farming community in Norfolk, this is where you do it.
A day on the stand
The stand was busy from the moment the gates opened. Until early afternoon the team fielded questions from local residents, landowners and a steady stream of school groups keen to understand the project. Some conversations were technical. Some were curious. All of them were worth having.
Projects on this scale succeed on the strength of relationships with the people who live and work along the route, and there is no substitute for answering questions face to face. A leaflet can explain a cable corridor. It can’t respond when someone asks what it means for their land.
The long game
The rest of the day went on networking: land agents representing clients in the project area, landowners the team already knew, and a few they didn’t. Nothing dramatic. Just the steady work of keeping relationships in good order, which is most of what stakeholder engagement actually is.
It’s easy to undervalue this part of the job because nothing visible gets built during it. But the conversations that make a project run smoothly in year three tend to start at events like this, long before anyone needs anything from anyone. By the time a consent condition needs discharging or an access agreement needs agreeing, it helps enormously if the person on the other side of the table already knows who you are.
Honourable mention to the John Deere 9RX, which drew a crowd all day on sheer scale alone. Some machinery doesn’t need a sales pitch.
Highlight of the day? After eight hours on a stand in the heat, a cold beer with colleagues. Some questions answer themselves.
Worth going?
Would we recommend the show to a colleague who’s never been? Yes. Livestock, machinery old and new, more than 700 trade stands, and a concentration of the local agricultural community you won’t find anywhere else in the calendar. You’ll come away with a better feel for how the people affected by infrastructure projects actually think about their land, which is worth more than most desk research.
If your work touches land in East Anglia, be there.