The clink of glasses and the lapping of the tide was punctuated by giggling toddlers and the slurp of oysters at tables populated by people gently sizzling on a baking day on the Kent seaside. But James Green, of the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, had the demeanour of a man who had found grit in his mollusc. Because we’re a family business, it’s a relatively small town?” Green, 58, is the director of the WOFC, a company he inherited from his father and whose roots can be traced back to 1793.
He has become embroiled in a battle over his plans for a seafood empire. The WOFC harvests about 2m oysters a year from Whitstable’s seabeds, half of which stay on the south coast to be sold in the company’s hotel and the four restaurants it runs on the front. It is Green’s application to extend the seating of one of those restaurants, the Forge oyster shack, on to a patch of beach used to store boats belonging to members of the Whitstable Yacht Club, that has caused a furore and which he says highlights a national problem.
Green is battling, he says, to grow a business that employs 200 people but could take on more, and which has cemented Whitstable’s reputation as “Britain’s Oysteropolis”. The new seating for the Forge would allow visitors to enjoy “half a dozen oysters and a glass of muscadet” on the sand, he said, and offer further reason to visit the town. In 1865, more than 100 boats in Whitstable harvested about 80m oysters for sale at the Billingsgate fish market each year.
By the 1970s, overfishing, pollution and the arrival of introduced diseases with imported stock resulted in the collapse of the industry. Green’s father, Barrie, bought the WOFC in 1976. The company had one employee and was barely functioning.
It was Green’s sons, James and Richard, who started the industrial-scale farming of non-native Pacific rock oysters in 2008, helping to make Whitstable’s reputation what it is today. But the Greens had to fight a lengthy and expensive campaign nearly a decade ago for the right to maintain the thousands of metal racks off the beach on which they grow. The company’s success – it is the owner of a considerable chunk of the town’s beach and its shoreline – has not brought affection.
The planning application in June for extra seating space and a pergola for the Forge has already attracted more than 200 opposing submissions, including from the Environment Agency which is concerned about the impact on flood defences. Some Whitstable residents called it “a carbuncle” and a “horrifying visual, physical and commercial intrusion”. Paul McNally, speaking on behalf of the Whitstable Beach Campaign, a group that was at the vanguard of the attempt to block the metal racks in 2018, said there was no justification for the Forge’s extension on to the beach.
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