Britain's biggest family where married couple have 22 children together

The parents at the head of Britain's biggest family - with 22 kids in whole - have opened up about the difficulties their marriage has faced.

The couple, who wed in 1993, live in Morecambe, Lancashire, in a £240,000 property that used to be a care home.

They originally met when Sue was seven years old, and she was pregnant by the time she was 14, carrying the child of Noel, who was four years her senior.

Instagram/theradfordfamily / Channel 5

Their first child, Christopher, was quickly followed by their second, Sophie and twenty more in quick succession.

The family are at the centre of a Channel 5 reality show 22 Kids & Counting, having previously appeared on 21 Kids & Counting.

After the birth of the Radford's latest child, Heidie, in April 2020, the show was updated to accommodate the family's growing brood.

The family first made headlines in 2008, when the couple announced they had a 'baker's dozen' after the birth of their thirteenth child.

Since then, the family have been a regular fixture in televised reality show and in headlines across the country.

Between them, Sue and Noel are parents to Chris, 33, Sophie, 29, Chloe, 27, Jack, 25, Daniel, 24, Luke, 22, Millie, 22, Katie, 20, James, 19, Ellie, 17, Aimee, 16, Josh, 15, Max, 14, Tillie, 12, Oscar, 11, Casper, 10, Hallie, seven, Phoebe, six, Archie, five, Bonnie, four and Heidie, two.

Sadly, the couple's seventeenth child, Alfie, passed away in July 2014.

Instagram/theradfordfamily

Last week, Sue revealed that she had nearly considered divorcing husband of thirty years, Noel, when the family had wound up in debt.

The couple, who had taken out a loan to start a pie business, were hit hard when foot and mouth disease hit Britain's livestock in the early 2000s.

With millions of cows and sheep being killed to halt the spread of the disease and the UK economy taking a £8 billion hit, things were difficult for the Radford family when tourism to their Cumbria village dried up.

Sue said: "I can't even describe it, it just caused so much stress.

"You used to go to bed thinking about the debt, you'd wake up thinking about the debt, you'd wake up during the night thinking about the debt.

"If anything was going to have caused us to get a divorce, it was this."

The mother-of-22 reflected: "Looking back now, it was a time where I genuinely thought our marriage was not gonna pull through that."

Ben Thompson