When I was 22, my dad, who was fed up with what I was doing with my life, showed me a shed down a lane off the high street in Lewes and said I could make of it what I could. It was mine, to get me started.

My dad owned a nursery just outside Lewes and we’d grown up, my brother and I, working pretty hard and learning about how the seasons work, how the weather works, what growing involves and how great it feels when all the hard work pays off and things do actually grow and you pluck them off a tree and bite in to them or bring them inside and cook them.

The only thing I knew about was fruit and veg and so I opened a tiny little greengrocer’s, which became a bigger greengrocer’s on the high street a few years later. It was very hard work, but I loved it.

Then, one night in October 2000, a flood swept through the town destroying hundreds of properties, including my shop and my house.  The day after the flood, we set up a makeshift stall on the high street – and we stayed like that for months, right through the winter, as the town slowly crept back to normality.

In 2001, we opened Bill’s Produce Store and Café on the site of our old shop and none of us could have imagined how successful it would become. We'd talked about it for long enough and thought we had a concept that people would like, but what we couldn't have guessed was that everyone would love it, that people would go out of their way to come to the café and then go away and tell all their friends about it. It was fantastic.

Then we won some awards, including the Observer Food Monthly Best Newcomer in 2006, so more people got to hear about us and our relatively small café in a relatively small town near the south coast became a bit of a sensation. What had started as some ideas and very hard work, had become a real, live and kicking, rustle and bustle place for people to meet for coffee or lunch and buy some good, local produce to take home to cook for supper.

We filled the shelves, from floor to ceiling, with Bill's jams and chutneys and baskets with seasonal fruit and vegetables. We baked, cooked and served deliciously different food, hung skeins of raffia from the ceiling, stacked towers of produce and hired lively, enthusiastic staff to look after our customers. We wanted Bill's to be somewhere that really celebrated food, that was abundant and welcoming to everyone. We wanted new customers to stop in their tracks to take everything in as they came through the door and regulars to feel like it was the next best place to home.