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earlyyears.teachwire.net
When Elena Mackey and Rachel Munro
Peebles decided to open a nursery, they
were determined to create a setting like no
other, as Nursery Business discovered...
lena Mackey and Rachel
Munro Peebles aren’t
obvious business partners.
Look at their backgrounds
and you’ll find little to
link them. In a wide-ranging career,
Elena has spent 20 years living in the
Middle East working for the likes of
Citibank, acquired a degree in business
and studied childcare, counselling and
Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Rachel,
by contrast, is a graduate of the Chelsea
School of Art, a former PR girl for Harvey
Nichols, and runs a property development
business based in Shoreditch. But a
chance meeting at the school gates has
led them to the early years sector, and
a particularly ambitious take on the
traditional nursery model.
For both nursery ownership is a fresh
challenge – a vocation in which they are
still finding their feet – but unfamiliarity
hasn’t diluted their vision, or dampened
their determination to offer local parents
and their children the best early years
education and care. Their setting, the
45-place Fount Nursery in Hackney
(fountnursery.com), is like no other you’ll
have seen before: boasting a unique
vintage-inspired interior, situated in an
arch under a railway bridge, neighboured
by a slow-cooking Northern Italian
restaurant and deli, set at the heart
of lifestyle family destination Fount
London (fountlondon.com), for which
the partnership is also responsible.
There have been challenges aplenty
to overcome in the six months since it
opened its doors, but with places filling
up fast, Elena and Rachel are confident
in their formula, and are already
planning for the future.
EAT, SHOP, PLAY
“I moved to the area three-and-a-half
years ago,” Elena says, as we sit down
in Il Cudega, the aforementioned Italian
restaurant, to talk about Fount London’s
beginnings. “Rachel was the first mum I
met in the playground at our daughters’
school. I just went over and said, ‘Hi, I’m
new – I think our two girls are in the
same class.’ We had a coffee here, a coffee
there, talked about what we wanted, what
we do. And then this all evolved.”
“Elena wanted to open a nursery
and had come across this site,” Rachel
explains. “When she showed it to me
I thought it was amazing. I’d had this
family destination concept in mind
for years, a place for parents to meet,
somewhere we could create a sense
of community. I suggested we take on
the three arches there are here, and the
space outside.” And just like that, Fount
London was born.
Their vision for Fount London is
encapsulated in its ‘Eat, Play, Shop’
tag-line: alongside Il Cudega and Fount
Nursery there’s a pop-up shop space,
occupied on a rotating basis by local
businesses. “The idea is that parents can
drop their children off, buy something in
the pop-ups, and then sit down for some
E
Running your own
business is really
difficult – you have
to eat, sleep and
breathe it.
food and coffee,” Rachel says. “Fount
London is the mother of the project, and
Fount Nursery is the heart – that’s how
we see it.”
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
Elena’s desire to open a nursery
stemmed from a recognition that local
parents were struggling to find the high-
quality early years provision they needed
to return to work. “I listened to mums,
spoke to them at my daughter’s school,”
she says. “I realised there was a huge
lack of childcare, and that most of what
was available wasn’t good.”
For Rachel, that was a familiar story:
“When I was looking for childcare, the
places I went to, you just wouldn’t have
put your children in,” she says. “We
decided we weren’t going to cut corners,
and that we would deliver something
that was true to parents in Hackney.”
This meant creating an environment,
and an atmosphere, in tune with
parents’ sensibilities, as well as one that
“We want it
to be perfect”
