About Hill & May

Hill & May is an independent guide to range cookers and country kitchens. The country kitchen, properly considered. We are here for the renovators, the home cooks, and the people standing in a showroom trying to work out whether an AGA, a Rayburn, an Esse, an Everhot, or a Stoves cooker is the right choice for their home and their bills.

We are not owned by a manufacturer or a retailer, and brands never pay for a place in our guides. No sponsored verdicts. We test, compare, and explain so you can spend with confidence.

How we research

We start with the cooker in the room. Where we can get hands on a model, we cook on it, time how long it takes to come up to heat, and note the things that only show up in daily use, like how the hob behaves with the kettle on it or how much space a 90cm cooker really eats in a galley kitchen.

For the figures that matter most, running costs and efficiency, we work from primary sources rather than guesswork. We use the published price caps and unit rates from Ofgem, manufacturer specification sheets, and installation rules covered by Gas Safe registration for gas models. Every cost figure carries the date and the rate it was based on, because energy prices move and a number with no date is no use to you.

We do not invent named experts or borrow credentials we do not have. Articles are written and edited by the Hill & May editorial team. When a claim sits outside our own testing, we cite where it came from so you can check it yourself.

Editorial standards

We write plainly and we try to be specific. A guide should tell you the actual width, the actual price at the time of writing, and the actual trade-off, not a vague impression. If we get something wrong, we correct it on the page and say what changed. If a price or rate is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.

Some outbound links may be affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you buy through them. This never changes what we recommend or where a cooker ranks. We would write the same verdict whether the link paid us or not.