Perhaps it’s unsurprising that we start in the boot room: if anyone knows what your home says about you, it’s Phil Spencer. And this one is a peach, crammed with photographs, fishing rods and reminders of great days in the field. There’s a giant board filled with game cards; an old butcher’s block serving as a gun-cleaning table; Snaffles prints, rosettes, a small wood-burning stove – and a lovely family armchair that has just been refurbished. Spencer runs his hand over the new yet seasoned leather: “Sitting here with a drink, and my boys, reflecting on a good day… what could be better?”

Spencer is a farmer’s son-turned-property expert who became half of one of television’s most-loved duos alongside his co-presenter Kirstie Allsopp. They’re best known for having guided countless families through the property minefield for an extraordinary 25 years of Location, Location, Location, a programme whose popularity hinges not just on the compelling ‘Kirstie and Phil’ dynamic but on the window it offers into people’s lives.

Punt guns and vintage taxidermy

Having taken cameras into so many homes, it evidently feels natural to show off his own – a beautiful Hampshire barn conversion – that soon reveals the breadth of its owners’ interests. The shelves and walls are decorated with hunting horns, punt guns, vintage taxidermy and more. A portrait of two favourite cockers takes pride of place above the fire; a mounted kudu gazes at them from the wall opposite. Outside there are beehives, chickens, sheep, horses, barn owl boxes and badgers. “After 20 years in London I was desperate for space, peace, greenery.” Growing up on his family’s farm in Kent, fieldsports were the obvious way to occupy a growing boy. “Shooting came first. I had ferrets and was given a 28-bore when I passed Common Entrance,” explains Spencer. “I’d spend a lot of time wandering round shooting rabbits and pigeon. My mother hunted with the East Kent for 50 years; both sisters evented. A family holiday was taking a caravan to The Game Fair… if someone saw a stoat or a fox or found a nest, that was a great topic of conversation.” His father instilled an early appreciation of ratios by giving him four cartridges for every pest bagged.

Fishing soon followed. Riding is the most recent addition, taken up just five years ago to enable Spencer to enjoy the sport with his wife Fiona, who shows a Cleveland Bay. “I do have a lot of hobbies; sometimes I think too many,” he grins, admitting he’s already been cycling and had a golf lesson today. “I also have a classic car and ski badly, and still play a bit of cricket. But I wouldn’t trade any of them to do one better.”

Rabbiting

Though school choices underpinned the move to Hampshire, sport soon fell into place when the new owner of a good local shoot sought out a syndicate to take it on. Spencer often shares his peg with his sons, his own taste being for wilder sport. Ask about red-letter outings and he talks about rabbiting on the Isle of Sheppey; snipe shooting from the Arundell Arms; woodcock on Islay; a day in a well-set pigeon hide. “I have a guide down in Kent and he’s a craftsman. He does the recce and set-up, and leaves me to it. To be there with the phone off, the dogs, Test Match Special on the radio – that is a happy day.”

Similarly, while he has a rod with the nearby Frensham Fly Fishers, Spencer becomes really animated discussing a forthcoming trip to Slovenia. A mahi mahi in the Bahamas is his biggest catch to date, and a blue marlin remains top of his bucket list. However, days in the field are not as numerous as these lists suggest; Spencer’s television commitments are substantial: “I might fish four times a year, go pigeon shooting three times… these dates go into the diary and everything else has to fit around them.” Sometimes work and play dovetail, as on a recent filming trip to New Zealand where he managed to land some brownies. “I’ll try to fish wherever I go – it’s my hunter-gatherer instinct I guess,” he says.

Game casserole

Unsurprisingly for such a sporting polymath, a Macnab is a lifetime ambition. “That would be a dream,” he says. “I’ve been stalking in Scotland twice and done it locally a bit.” Plating up his quarry is also all part of the fun for Spencer – “I make a mean game casserole; trout usually get taken to the smoker” – who is a committed patron of the Country Food Trust, whose valuable work delivering nutritious and game-rich meals to food banks and those in need he’s keen to highlight.

His views on farm inheritance tax (“just not thought through”) and planning reform and development (“issues we’ve all got to be grown up about”) are interesting, and he’s acutely aware of the pressures on fieldsports and the need to protect them for future generations. “All these sports are under threat and it only takes a small minority to muck it up for everybody,” he declares. How good it is, then, to find someone so prominent in the media who can discuss sport and conservation with the ease of someone who’s loved both all his life. Spencer has made a television series on great British dog walks with his German shorthaired pointer, Luna, but could he be about to pick up the baton from Messrs Whitehouse, Mortimer and Clarkson with more rural interest programmes?

“I’d love to make a television programme that helps urban people understand rural ways of life, and vice versa,” he muses. “Oddly enough my production company was just discussing a fishing show concept but one that took footballers to catch fish around the world. And I thought, hang on, that should be me!”