The Derby name is synonymous with racing worldwide, but now the 19th Earl hopes it will be linked with green concerns

KNOWSLEY Hall and Park embodies what most people regard as the template for a great stately home and estate.

This stupendous Queen Anne-style house grandly sits amid rolling parkland which resembles a slice of the Cotswolds rather than the urban Liverpool it abuts.

Yet even timeless scenes are in reality dynamic – after all, the M57 hums with traffic just beyond the estate wall.

In fact, nothing stays immune from the forces of nature and economics.

But the 19th Earl of Derby is nothing if not determined to consolidate his inheritance and ensure its commercial success.

There is no question of Merseyside’s premier aristocrat, who is also president of Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, selling up and bowing out of the ancestral seat his family has occupied since 1385.

He fully intends to leave its 2,500 acres, properties and tenancies in good order for the next generations and those after it.

In order to do this, Lord Derby has seen the “green” light and believes that an ecological approach to his business makes sense on every level.

“Most individuals want to go green. Deep down we feel working with nature is the right thing to do,” said Lord Derby.

“We have more of a general feeling of both social and corporate responsibility.

“There is a dispute over the University of East Anglia’s climate change data, but it’s impossible not to sense that something is going on.

“We know we’re belching out a lot of carbon.

“It’s not just about doing it to make yourself feel good, it’s also good for business .

“The first step in the process is knowledge. You need to start learning to get some green credentials. There are far more options than you realise.”

When Edward Stanley inherited Knowsley from his uncle, the 18th Earl of Derby, in 1994, Knowsley Safari Park was already established.

The Safari Park, which is the biggest of its kind in Britain and attracts over 500,000 annual visitors from the North West and to Hull along the M62 corridor.

The visitor numbers have held up through the recession, probably because Britons were not holidaying abroad as much.

Almost all of the 1970s building complex on the 500-acre Safari Park has been renewed since then.

However, last year the latest construction project offered Lord Derby a chance to put his green credentials into practice.

The first big step was to rebuild what was the Giraffe House, which £120,000 later has been converted into the 25m-long Antelope House.

“This was the last of the original Safari Park complex buildings dating from when it was opened in 1971 by my uncle.

“I wanted to see if we could do something special and so incorporated an air source heat pump.”

“I was amazed at how small these units are. During construction, hundreds of metres of piping was set under the floor.”

This piece of kit alone cost £20,000, or a sixth of the overall building price.

The system is based on the ambient temperature of the ground just beneath the surface being a steady 10°-11°C and no less than 4°C: “Working on the heat differential principle, the building’s temperature can be raised to a very comfortable level for the animals inside,” said Lord Derby.

“We got it running in November with just a couple of ostriches and some rhea, but by the December freeze every species was in there and it looked like Noah’s Ark.

“I’m waiting to see what the running costs are like and how economic it is to run.

“In the Safari Park, we have a range of animals people don’t normally see and many are endangered species.

“Climate change must have some effect on this.

“So I’m interested in putting a couple of wind turbines in the Safari Park car park.”

This has led to the “Big Wind” study and he said: “Such places are not pretty things and so they wouldn’t spoil the view.

“I want loads of gizmos and things to inspire young visitors while instead of burning loads of gas we save it.

“However, the park is in the green belt so we’re in discussion with the planners, who have not said ‘no’ yet.”

Green policy has two main elements: conservation, as in how much energy you can keep, and generation, which is how much energy you can make efficiently.

One such source is anaerobic digestion, which is not a stomach complaint, but processes whereby microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen.

“As part of an integrated waste management system, anaerobic digestion reduces the emission of landfill gas into the atmosphere. We’ve looked at an anaerobic digestion machine, but unfortunately they need to run on the same stuff.

“The Safari Park produces plenty of animal dung, but of greatly differing types.

“The machines don’t like mixing camel dung with elephant dung and so on.

“About one third gas is produced to two thirds heat, and I can imagine it being really useful to housing developments in future.”

Whether he is debating to include this in his controversial housing development on his 100-acre estate at Newmarket, Suffolk, is the least of his worries.

It must have been a shock for the head of a family which has dominated British horse-racing to find himself receiving such opprobrium from the racing fraternity. After all, in 1780, the 12th Earl of Derby lent his title to a contest on Epsom Downs that became the world’s greatest flat horse race.

Opponents in Newmarket claim the huge development would increase the population of the town by 5,000 from its current 15,000.

Are Lord Derby’s green credentials in doubt when campaigners claim the additional traffic from the 1,200 home development would create an unbearable burden on the town’s infrastructure and drive racing away?

Lord Derby responded: “The population of the UK is going up, in particular in the South-East there is a housing shortage.

“The proposal is for 600 homes by 2021, and then 600 between 2021 and 2031.”

He said building on his farmland, which is home to his own Stanley House Stud, near Newmarket’s centre, was better than other options.

“The alternative (to his scheme) is putting up 50 or 60 houses in each of the villages around Newmarket.

“Nobody has a greater interest than I in ensuring that the development is appropriate.

“I would have thought that it was better that somebody who knows and loves racing would be a much more sympathetic developer.”

Within a short time of Lord Derby inheriting Knowsley, he was faced with the enormous task of finding a new use for the old Hall.

The Derby family live elsewhere on the estate in a 1960s house, and the huge old hall was occupied by Merseyside Police, which was soon to terminate its lease.

“We looked at many options for the old Hall, including opening to the public, but none were viable,” said Lord Derby.

“So we decided to turn it into a conference centre, which was also available for private hire for events like weddings and film shoots.