River Cottage HQ wins tourism award

The sell-out awards, celebrated the breadth of Devon's tourism offer as a county, and showed the strength of the award’s finalists and winners, with the awards receiving 174 entries.

River Cottage HQ came home with the gold award in the Artistic, Cultural and Learning Experience category.

Hugh said: "This is fantastic news and a great tribute to the hard work of our fantastically talented team. "Artistic, cultural and learning" covers a lot of our core strengths, so we were delighted to come home with this particular award."

Awards organiser Robin Barker addressed the winners, saying: "You are all very special - in an era of ever dwindling public sector funding you are the industry leaders who can take Devon forward. More and more it will be businesspeople like you that must take the lead in putting Devon at the fore, ensuring it is at the forefront of what is one of the fast growing and most competitive industries in the world.”

The full list of winners and runners up can be found here.