Chicken chic has taken off. Championed by chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hen-keeping has, it seems, grown from the preserve of a small rural flock into a booming urban pastime.

After Oliver made a televised assault on battery chickens earlier this year, sales have trebled of the Eglu, a designer chicken coop made of colourful plastic. Worries about industrial agriculture and a desire for healthy food have fuelled the enthusiasm for home-laid eggs.

“For many people it [hen-keeping] represents a slice of the rural idyll in the city,” said Johannes Paul, one of the four designers who created the Eglu when they were students at the Royal College of Art in London and the Miss Pepperpot. They each lay six eggs a week.

Chris Evans, the radio DJ, bought a bright blue extended version of the Eglu for his home in Surrey, the Conservative MP, who has one in his garden in West Sussex.

The Eglu is made by an Oxfordshire-based company called Omlet. It says that its sales began to take off in January after Oliver, also an owner, launched his on-screen attack against broiler-house chickens in his Channel 4 programme Jamie’s Fowl Dinners.

Models of the Eglu cost from £360 to £700, but a cut-price version is set to go on sale this summer for about £200.

By some estimates, 500,000 households now keep chickens. Many owners are so proud of their flocks that they have taken to organising “hen parties” in which current and prospective owners gather in gardens to cuddle and talk to chickens and learn about keeping them.

The most principled urban hen-owners are taking Oliver at his word and, rather than accepting the Eglu’s designer birds, are keeping scrawny “rescue chickens” saved from slaughterhouses.

The Battery Hen Welfare Trust, whose patrons include Oliver, employs 45 rescue co-ordinators across Britain. It estimates that it has saved and re-homed 80,515 birds since starting as a one-woman enterprise in 2003.

The trust says that interest has climbed in recent months, with more than 22,000 chickens rescued this year alone. In Surrey the waiting list for people wanting rescued birds is three months long.

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