Horsham visitor attraction's director can see 'light at the end of tunnel' after funding plea

Huxley’s Birds of Prey Centre – located within the Brighton Road Hilliers Garden Centre, just outside Horsham – is a charity and needs to raise money to help care for its birds and animals and to enable improvement and expansion plans to go ahead.

The centre was founded in 1993 by bird lover Julian Ford who developed it from what was once a dumping site into an award-winning garden and much-loved home for falcons, eagles, hawks, buzzards, owls, vultures – and other animals.

Fellow bird-lover Luke Lloyd took over the centre when Julian died in 2021 and in December he put out a plea and said the centre desperately needs urgent attention and a makeover. He launched an online fundraiser to help.

He said: “Huxley’s is a not for profit organisation, relying on amazing volunteers who give up their time out of love and passion for the amazing animals we have here,” said Luke.

But we caught up with Luke recently and he said he could see ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.

He revealed to us it currently costs around £70,000 to £100,000 a year to run. With Luke’s ambitious plans of renovation, bringing in more animals and employing full time staff, that would rise to £170,000 to £200,000 a year.

"It's been a struggle,” Luke told us. “We did this year put out a post about supporting us and helping us to get through the winter. In the last couple of years, it's been a case of you're robbing Peter to pay Paul and it gets me very stressed and affects my mental health at times.

"Since going to the charity and the support people have been giving us made it a bit easier this year and I do see light on the end of the tunnel, especially with the gift aid additions and stuff like that now.

"Going forward we should hopefully be on top of it and ahead of ourselves which will be a fantastic situation to be in.”

The centre is relatively small but has a lot of enclosures that need upkeep. The centre is home to more than 80 incredible birds - including falcons, hawks, eagles, owls, raptors, and more and there’s even the cutest meercats – and has around 25 volunteers who help.

Luke said: “You can see from looking around that we've got enclosures that need renovating as well. They're very old and that's going to cost a huge amount of money as well to do because they're all around the lawn so ideally you do them, not all in one go, but you'll do a succession of maybe two or three together and then keep going around as opposed to one at a time.

"It would be nice to look at that possibility of being able to do that and have that financial security to do that to improve the well-being of the birds. It's ideal what they're in at the moment but obviously there's the risk that they are rotting and everything else like that.

“So we've got some plans to really step things up a little bit here when we do those renovations on enclosures and we've got other ideas to bring in other animals and exotics in as well.”

There are several ways the public and visitors can contribute.

Luke said: “We've got our Just Giving page, we've also got our Amazon Wishlist and we've got a whole page dedicated to how people can support and we're part of the Horsham Lottery now as well.

"We've put all these things in place a lot more so since having the charity status which we got in August of 2024. People are able to gift aid on their admission

which they've been doing as well so that really helps and it's helping to give us more of a positive future.”

For more information, including opening and display times, VIP experiences and more visit https://www.huxleysbop.co.uk/.