25 minute read
John Gapper returns to the scene of the most violent battle of the miners’ strike
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When Norman Strike was a coal miner, his surname was apposite. In 1983, at the age of 32, Strike stood for election as a union official at his mine, Westoe colliery in South Tyneside. He lost by seven votes: “I said it was because nobody wanted to vote for a Strike.”
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A year later, on June 18 1984 – 32 years ago this weekend – Strike reachedthe topofa hillabovethe Orgreave coking works near Rotherham in South Yorkshire.Itwasjustafter8amona hot,sunny day and he was in a group of miners who had come by coach from Westoe to picket. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by its controversial president Arthur Scargill, had called a national strike three monthsbeforetoresista programme of pitclosures backed by Margaret Thatcher’s government.
From his vantage point, Strike gazed down on a scene of battle.He hearda loud roar as hundreds of miners ran up a field towards him, chased by mountedpolice.Beyond them,hesaw linesofpolice in riot gear, and behind them the plant itself, a sprawling, smoking complex at which fuel was refinedfromcoal.Strike hadbeenreadingGerminal,
NormanStrike Formerminer
Emile Zola’s novel about a miners’ strike in 19thcentury France, as part of an Open University course, and he remembers that a passage from it came vividly to mind: “This pit, piled up in the bottom of a hollow with its squat brick buildings, raisingitschimneylike athreateninghorn, seemed to him to have the evil air of a gluttonous beast, crouching there to devour the earth.”
The day culminated in a pitched fight in the village of Orgreave, with a car set on fire, miners throwing bricks and stones, and mounted police cantering along a village street beating miners and others with batons. There were more than 120 official casualties, including broken bones, cuts from bricks and truncheon blows. Ninety-three miners were arrested and 55 were later charged with riot, then a common law offence for which the maximum sentence was life imprisonment.
Orgreave was a pivotal moment in the strike, which lasted until March 1985 before being called offasmany minerscrossedpicketlinestoreturnto work.Bythe endofJune 18 1984, it wasclearpicketingwouldnot haltcokeproductionatOrgreaveand thusclosethe steelworksatScunthorpethat relied onit.Scargillwasinjuredand takentohospital,with one of his key aims defeated. “Until then, I was optimistic that we could win but the writing was on the wall after that,” says Strike. “We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone.”
The winners were the National Coal Board and Thatcher, who wantedtoimposethe government’s will over nationalised industries, and stop unions blocking closures or shrinkage.With the defeat of the NUM,and later of theprintworkersinthe 1986 Wapping dispute, the government had the upper hand.Thatcher’s abilitytoreformthe economyand unleash the rationalisation of loss-making industries – and deregulation of the City of London in 1986 – was ensured at Orgreave.
History is written by the victors, and the narrative of Orgreave is that the police had to battle to contain violent picketing. But after 32 years, the losers may be about to rewrite it. Pressure on home secretaryTheresaMay to setupaninquiry increased when an inquest jury found in April that South Yorkshire police, the force in charge at Orgreave, contributed to the deaths of 96 Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough in 1989.Officers then tried to hide their blunders by blaming fans.
Barbara Jackson, a former NCB employee who tookpartinthe strike, leads theOrgreaveTruthand Justice Campaign,a pressuregroup of formerminers and allies formed four years ago. “Thatcher won industrially but she did not win culturally or emotionally,”she says.“Ithas notmadepeoplelovewhat happened. For a lot of them, it was a shock to see a government could treat its own people like that.”
It is another sunny day as I ascend to the spot whereStrike stoodin1984.The landscapeishugely changed.The coking plant was demolished after its closure in 1990 and the field is steadily being covered. “Welcome to Renaissance,” reads one sign advertising “a fantastic range of three and four bedroom houses”, selling for up to £320,000. An industrial park sits nearby, with a manufacturing research centre run by Sheffield University, two wind turbines and a new Rolls-Royce engine blade plant. The past is buried and the new town on the site of the battle has been christened “Waverley”.
Kevin Horne, a former miner arrested that day and chargedwithunlawfulassembly, althoughthe charge was later dropped, walks beside me. ▶
◀Horne is part of theOrgreavecampaignand argues that South Yorkshire police could gain as much from an inquiry as ex-miners and their relatives.
Hesaysitmay providea senseofclosuresincepolice are still distrusted in former mining villages although most are too young to have been there.
“Iwasupset at thetimeand even if I seeitontelevision now, I get upset,” Horne says. He coughs slightly as he climbs the hill. “My wife cries, even mygranddaughtercries.She’s18.They’rethe people
I would like to start respecting the police again, because we can’t go on forever. They’re all we’ve got, no matter how good or bad they are.We’ve got to give them a chance to make a fresh start.”
Iwas atOrgreave on May 29 1984, another day of troublethreeweeksearlier. Itfeaturedmounted police charges, stone throwing, pickets shoving police lines, and 80 arrests. Scargill was arrested for obstruction the next morning as he stopped on that hill and the Yorkshire Post’s headline read, “The Battle of Orgreave”. It turned out to be a prelude to the bloodier, decisive battle to come.
As a 25-year-old news reporter for the northern edition of the Daily Mail, I spent weeks that year
KevinHorne Formerminer
reportingonthe strike,arrivinginpitvillagesbefore dawntoseewhetherany minerswould cross picket lines.Afterthat,I mightwalktothe makeshiftcanteens set up by the Women Against Pit Closures group and have a cup of tea.The Mail’s sympathies were heavily with the government and working miners, but I usually got a polite welcome.
OnMay 29,I drovetoOrgreaveand walkeddown the hill to a pen behind the police lines where the media werecorralled.The Mail hadsent more senior reporters and my presence was superfluous, so I decided to climb up and stand among pickets who were gathering to try to block lorries of coking coal from leaving the plant. It was 7am and, with the midsummersolstice near,the sunwas alreadyhigh.
For a while, the few hundred miners milled around andchattedinfrontofa line of police,orsat on the stubble in the mown field and enjoyed the sun.Scargillarrived,ina trucker’scapwiththe logo ofa supportive US union,and stood50mtomyright. At 8am, as 35 lorries laden with coke emerged, the minerschanted,“Herewego, herewego,”and trotted forward to pushen masseat the police lines.As they did, a few men threw missiles – stones and half-bricks – from the back.
Scargill emerged from the crowd to remonstrate through a loudhailer. “We are not going to do anything by throwing things except hit our own lads,” I noted him saying at the time. “If there had been nomissiles,wewould down be at thegates by now.” But as frustration grew, so did disorder and police reaction, with mounted police riding out to break up the crowd. By the end of the day, 24 police had been treated for injuries, along with 19 pickets.
The battles of Orgreave might not have occurred at all. Some officials in the NUM’s Yorkshire area, which had 250,000workingmembersatthe time, thought focusing on Orgreave was a wasteofenergybecausethe policewere so well organised. They favoured sending more picketstoNottinghamshire andDerbyshire,where many miners were still working.
“Flying pickets” – striking miners who went to other regions to enforce the strike – found their task hard, though. Pressed by the government to block mass picketing, the police turned cars full of miners away from motorway exits near pits. But they did not cordon off Orgreave. “The police told us where to go. They couldn’t have been more helpful unless they’d put on valet parking,” says Chris Kitchen, then a 17-year-old striker and now the NUM general secretary. “With hindsight, that was probably a good reason to say, ‘Hang on, we’ll go somewhere else.’”
Scargill choseOrgreave in an effort to repeat his victory at the Saltley Gate coke works in Birmingham in 1972, shut by a mass picket of the NUMand otherunionsinprotestatthe payrestraint policyofEdwardHeath’sgovernment.Thatcher was determined not to be caught in the same way, and South Yorkshire police were extremely well prepared.On June 18, they assembled a force of 4,200 from10counties,including50mountedpolice,58 police dogs and several riot units.
That June morning, as Norman Strike ran down the hill to join other pickets, he was joining the second phase of battle. The first, before 8am, involveda build-up similar to May 29, withminers millingaround in frontofthe police linesand probably (although some dispute it) sporadic stone throwing.The second startedat8am, afteraninitial shoveagainstpolice linesasthe lorriesentered the plant to load up. The lines parted and mounted police cantered through, sending miners running.
As Strike arrived, the police line had reformed. “Scargillwasatthe frontand I wasrightbesidehim. I remember him saying, ‘Come on lads, I’ve seen bigger horses at Scarborough racecourse.’” The minerspushedforwardatthe line again,withmore missiles being thrown from the back. “There was a core of dedicated pickets and others who went along for the ride and would throw stones,” Strike says. “Often they’d hit us. I assume they were miners but I called them bloody idiots.”
A line of police in riot helmets, holding long shields, now stood at the front.A second mounted advance had no greater effect in calming the crowd – the reverse, in fact – and finally, at 8.30am, a historic event occurred. The line again parted and horses cantered forward, this time followed by riot police running out with round shields and truncheons raised. It was one of the first times that riot tactics drawn from policing in Hong Kong and former British colonieshad beenusedon the mainland. “You know what you are doing. No heads,
“Largely a museum now”: union history at the NUM headquarters
BarbaraJackson, Secretaryofthe Orgreave Truth andJusticeCampaign
bodies only,” one officer was recorded calling on police video.
In the melee of police and miners fighting as the riot snatch squad tried to pull particular people out ofthe crowd, an ITVcameracrewfilmedone officer with a raised truncheon striking the head and shoulders of a miner who was fallingtothe ground. It had a shock effect when broadcast on national news that evening, along with other scenes of running battles and violence. The Telegraph reported the following day that the Queen had expressed concern at the televised spectacle.
After the third cavalry charge, calm returned and some miners drifted off to buy drinks on what was by then a hot, thirsty day. (“Miners work in that temperature all the time, so we know about keeping hydrated,” Kitchen jokes.) The police, many helmeted and in heavy uniform, had less opportunity for refreshment, which may have made them touchier. As tensions mounted again, Anthony Clement, the assistant chief constable in charge of operations,fatefullyorderedthe clearance of the field.
Three decades later, it is not clear why he did, rather than ordering the police to hold the line and soak up the pressure. Strike thinks the move was provoked by a group nearby setting fire to a riot shieldtheyhadcaptured.“Iwastalkingtoa journalist from Socialist Worker and he said, ‘Norman, your trousers are on fire.’ The stubble was very dry and flames had spread.As I bent down to put them out, the line parted again. I can still see the horses trotting out and breaking into a gallop.”
The police chased hundreds of miners up the field towards a railway embankment and bridge leading into the village. “A horse was coming after me, and I heard the swish of a truncheon,” Strike recalls. “I leapt over a wall at the top and rolled down the embankment.” Ken Capstick, who later became the Yorkshire NUM’s vice-president, ran across the bridge with his son and into a supermarket. “God knows what the shoppers thought when the miners invaded for shelter,” he says.
Events were now spiralling out of control. The police were far from the coking plant, facing hundreds of frightened, angry miners. Scargill was injuredand takentohospital,claimingtohavebeen struck on the head by a riot shield (police said he had fallen over).Some strikersbuilt barricades, and a car was dragged across the road by the bridge ▶
◀ and set on fire. The stone and brick throwing intensified. Finally, Clement ordered a charge of mounted police into Orgreave village itself. An iconic photograph of Orgreave (shown on page 45)wastakenthere: LesleyBoulton,fromthe SheffieldWomen AgainstPit Closuresgroup,raising her arm as a mounted officer leans outto strike her witha longbaton.“Irememberseeingone manrun up a fire escape at the side of the supermarket, and a police horsetryingtochasehimupit,” says Strike. “There might have been some stones thrown, but comeon.[Thepolice]werearmedfromheadtotoe, and it was our lads who got their heads beaten.”
Mike McColgan, legal adviser to the Orgreave campaign, was then a trainee solicitor in Sheffield and knewGarethPeirce,a human rights lawyer who had represented striking miners. “Gareth phoned and said, ‘Oh, Mike, I wonder if you could come over to Rotherham?We’ve got 71 clients in custody.’There were six to eight to a cell and it was boiling hot.” Horne, who had been arrested in a picket near the coking plant gates, remembers being taken to
ChrisKitchen Generalsecretary, NUM
a courtyard at a Sheffield police station, and finding a group of injured miners. “They were in a very bad way, bleeding from their heads and some with broken legs. Most injuries were on the backs of their heads, as if they had been running away. The best we could do was bandage them withT-shirts.” The 1985 riot trial ended with the prosecution withdrawing its case after Clement faced tough cross-examination on his version of events, and police statements about individual arrests were found to have many similar phrases. Charges against other miners were dropped and South Yorkshire police paid £525,000 compensation and legalcostsina settlement.“Batonswereusedwithout compunctiononthat dayand causedinordinate injuries,” says Michael Mansfield, a defence barrister at that trial. “Yet not a single police officer has been disciplined or prosecuted.” South Yorkshire Police has declared itself open to an Orgreave inquiry. Dave Jones, appointed interim chief constable after the Hillsborough inquest, says he would “welcome an appropriate independent assessment”. Until now, the nearest to an inquiry was a “scoping exercise” last year by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which decided not to conduct a full investigation, partly because of “the passage of time” making it impossible to pursue allegations of assault. The police conduct is not the only source of resentment; there was also the conduct of the media, especially the BBC. Although Fleet Street newspapers such as the Mail tended to take the government’sside,publicservicebroadcasterswere supposed to be balanced. The BBC’s 5.40pm news bulletin on the day did not have the same footage as ITV of police hitting miners and Alan Protheroe, the BBC’sassistantdirector general,toldaninternal meetinglater in theweekthat he thoughtit“might not have been wholly impartial”. Another accusation – first noted in the same meeting– hassteadilyescalated over theyears:that the BBC “reversed the footage” deliberately or accidentally to give the impression that police had attacked miners before the latter responded with stone-throwing. The late Tony Benn, MP for the mining constituency of Chesterfield, told parliament near the end of the strike that, “I know from BBC editors who took part in that bulletin that there were three cavalry charges before a single stone was thrown.” This version of history is clearly untrue – no one I talked to who was there on June 18 argues that. Some, including Kitchen, make a lesser claim: that miners threw stones only after the first mounted advance. Even this appears quite unlikely. Howard Giles, a historical re-enactment specialist who in 2001 worked with the artist Jeremy Deller on his reconstruction of the battle of Orgreave in 2001 (an event involving 800 miners, police and volunteers) believes it is inaccurate. “The miners were standing around, it was quite good-natured and there was a bit of football and banter between lines.Then the stones started hitting, the police brought in long shields, and it started to turn nasty,” says Giles, who interviewed many participants on both sides. “Whoever threw those stones set off a battle that the vast majority of the police and miners did not want.” In 1991 the NUM’s The Miner newspaper reportedone BBCmanageradmittingina letterthat “an editor inadvertently reversed” one sequence, but the correspondence has since been lost. “I am
not surethatI have ever gottothe bottom of that,” saysTonyHarcup,a seniorlecturerinjournalismat Sheffield University who investigated the affair. The BBC has never officially conceded it and there were so many advances and counter-attacks that it is not even clear what the missing letter meant.
There is a danger of replacing one myth – that the battle of Orgreave was entirely the striking miners’ fault – with the equal and opposite myth that they were victims of wholly unprovoked aggression. A more plausible history is that occasional stone throwing in the early stages, such as I witnessed on May 29, triggered a police response that passedthroughchoreographedstagesofescalation to violent, chaotic loss of control.
Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University, has studied other examples of public demonstrations that turned violent. “There is often a tendency to focus on who started it, but it is really in the interaction of both sides,” he says. “Often,it’sthe outcomeofwhat is essentiallypolice ineptitude. Senior commandersattempttodisperse the crowd but they are not really in control. Units start to act independently as they get embedded in hostile conflicts of their own creation.”
For the Orgreave campaigners, ineptitude is an insufficient explanation.They point to how police guidedminerstherewhileturningthemawayfrom othersites.“Ifthe police andthe governmentdidn’t want June 18 to happen, all they had to do was put road blocks in place,” says Barbara Jackson. “It was a set-up and a showdown. This is unfinished business because it is so close to us. The miners are convinced that there is one rule of law for them and another for other people. “
The psychological impact of the strike has lingered longer than most physical injuries. Many miners felt betrayed not just by police actions but how the story was told. Nick Jones, industrial correspondentforBBCradioatthe time,partlyagrees. “Therewasno doubt thestrike wasseenasa threat to democracy, and I think I ended up becoming a sort of cheerleader forthe returntowork. I reported on a narrative that suited the establishment.”
In one respect, Jones thinksOrgreave would be impossible today. “At Orgreave as with other confrontations, the media tended to be behind police linesoratthe edge of theaction.Thereareveryfew press pictures [in the middle], which is why the image of Lesley Boulton is so memorable. Today, everyone has a camera in his or her phone. There would be so much material that it would be impossible forthe police to get away withwhat they did.”
TheAdvanced Manufacturing Research Centre by the Orgreave site is an encouraging example of what was oftenpromised to regenerateindustrial areas but too rarely delivered. It is run by Sheffield University in partnership withaerospace andhightechnologymanufacturers including Boeing, Airbus and Rolls Royce. It researches techniques such as how to make an aero engine’s titanium shell with less waste. From six employees in 2012, the centre has grown to 530 and expects to double that.
Three years ago, it opened a training centre at which 350 apprentices are being taught to work in such companies.They join at 16 and study for four years, during which they are paid between £7,000 and £12,000 a year. “With the history of this area, a number of them are earning the only income in
their families,” says Colin Sirett, chief executive of the AMRC. “It is very humbling to hear the challenges they’ve faced.”
The last miners’ jobs vanished from Yorkshire last December when the Kellingley deep mine closed withthe lossof450 jobs.The NUM, once one of the UK’s largest and strongest unions has been reducedtoa curiosity – it hasonly300 payingmembers. Kitchen works at the union’s head office in Barnsley,wherebannersfromallthe oldminesline its grandassemblyhall.What was once anembodiment of a living industry is largely a museum.
The union provides advice to retired miners on healthconditions, oftenlung diseases such as pneumoconiosis, bronchitis and emphysema. Kitchen estimates that 60 per cent of former miners have healthissues.“Withthe benefitofhindsight,itwas always goingtobeanuphillstruggle,” he says of the strike.“Itwas nevergoingtobewon withthe Tories in power because they were pursuing a plan to privatise the assets. Not because I’m a miner, purely as a UK citizen, I think that’s damaged everyone.”
I met Margaret Thatcher only once, two years after Orgreave, when I had left the Daily Mail for the Daily Telegraph (a year later, I would join the FTasa labourcorrespondent).The strike wasbeaten and she was nearing the peak of her powers as the economy expanded and unemployment fell. The biggest criticism she faced was that the north was beingleftbehind as thesouth boomed– then called the “north-south divide”.
Thatcher was touring Manchester and came one evening to visit the Telegraph’s new print plant. I was among a group of employees to whom she was introduced and she chatted to us for two minutes. The next day I covered her visit to a hospital, outsidewhich a noisycrowdofprotestershadgathered. “What about the north-south divide, Mrs Thatcher?” a journalist asked amid the din, as she stood with her back to me.
“There is no such thing,” she declared. “There are examples of enterprise around the country... ” Asshe spoke,she turned and, incredibly, recognised me. “...such as theTelegraphplantinTrafford Park,” she finished triumphantly to my face. It is how I remember the prime minister who defeated the miners– defyingshoutsofprotestand,inaninstant, seizing the narrative. 6 John Gapper is the FT’s chief business commentator
Jancis Robinson ‘Torres began a quest to rescueCatalan grapes from various points on the spectrum between obscurity and near-extinction’ The grapedetective
Miguel A Torres was one of the most famous wine producers in the world when, in 1979, the 1970 Cabernet Sauvignon he made in Barcelona’s hinterland, Penedès, triumphed over the likes of Ch Latour 1970 and Ch La Mission
Haut-Brion 1961.The competition was the
Gault-Millau Wine Olympics, and some think the French gastronomic magazine organised the taste-off to re-establish French supremacy after
California’s triumph in the so-called Judgment of Paris three years earlier. If so, it failed.
Torres was lauded for his cosmopolitan outlook and for following in the footsteps of the much smaller producer Jean León by importing well-known international grape varieties such as Cabernet and Chardonnay into Penedès.
But 10 years later, in a dramatic volte-face, he began a quest to find and rescue local Catalan grapes from various points on the spectrum between obscurity and near-extinction.The move was not just prescient – indigenous varieties are much more fashionable at the moment – but also driven by concern about climate change and sustainability, the theory being that vines with a long history in a region are likely to be particularly well acclimated to it.
This vine recovery programme, now involving his son MiguelTorres Maczassek, who returned from the company’s Chilean operation four years ago, has been an extremely long-term project, embarked upon in the late 1980s and dependent on the simple expedient of putting ads in the local press asking people to contact them if they came across unidentified grape varieties.
As a result, the Torres bodega in Vilafranca del Penedès received hundreds of telephone calls.Torres worked on samples of vine fragments in conjunction with the University of
Montpellier and its DNA-analysing equipment.
In about 50 instances, the mystery vines turned out to be genuinely mysterious.
The next step was to treat the plant material to ensure it was entirely free of the viruses that plague so many grapevines, then to multiply it in vitro before planting the baby vines in their greenhouse nursery, grafting the cuttings on to rootstocks resistant to the phylloxera louse, the scourge of grapevines throughout the world, before planting out blocks of each variety that are big enough to yield grapes from which several hundred litres of a sample wine could be made.Torres now has a specific microvinification cellar where Miguel’s sister Mireia is in charge of research.
Tasting and analysing all 50 of these samples was a painstaking task, and disappointing in most cases.The varieties may have been rare and unequivocally Catalan but very few yielded wine of any real interest. In the end, the Torres family’s patient researches have managed to identify and rescue six distinct and promising indigenous grape varieties.
Varietal versions of five of them were bottled earlier this year for the first proper vintage of 2015. A varietal 2014 Garró had already been bottled because this vine variety was identified as early as 1990 and has been part of Torres’s spicy, complex Grans Muralles blend of local grapes since its first vintage in 1996.
One of the most promising new finds is a white wine grape the family call Forcada. They have fewer than three hectares planted, as high as 500m in the Alt Penedès, nearTorres’s Sauvignon Blanc (sold as Fransola). It has the disadvantage of being very late-ripening, a whole month after Chardonnay, for instance. But it has great extract, acidity and firm flavours, somewhere between peach and leafy. I could easily imagine it making fine base wine for classic sparkling wine such as the vast amount of Cava that is produced around Torres headquarters in Penedès. But the still varietal 2015 I tasted in London inApril was impressive in its own right.
Of the reds, in addition to the spicy, plummy Garró 2014, I tasted 2015s made respectively from Pirene (planted in Torres’s highest vineyard at an elevation of 950m), Moneu, Gonfaus and Querol. I was impressed by how distinctively different they were from each other. These were wines with real personalities, even if in the long run they may not be bottled as single-varietal wines but may be used more often as components to improve a blend.
From the 2015 vintage, the quantities made of these varietal wines vary from just 450 litres to 2,700. The Torres family are still waiting for the Spanish and Catalan authorities to recognise these “new old” vines officially and this may not happen for a year, or more in the case of particularly virused Pirene. ▶
Torres Grans Muralles
2009 The recuperated Garró and now Querol are minor ingredients in the Grans Muralles red blend that is my favourite wine from a vast range made by Torres’s various operations in Spain. The 2009 is £68.90 at Hedonism Wines (0207 290 7870)
◀ This is a great shame since Pirene was the most forward and expressive of them, charming, fruity and bursting with redcurrant flavours. It reminded me a little of the Mencía of Bierzo in north-west Spain. Moneu was grippy, even a little bitter, and seemed rather Italianate in structure – a good blender, perhaps? Gonfaus was also very impressive – the most voluptuous wine with a hint of orange peel, already quite well-balanced and very direct but still quite youthful. As for Querol, it is extremely strong, almost feral, combining masses of tannin with wild elderberry flavours.
The Torres family are keen to encourage as many of their neighbours to plant the varieties they have recently discovered – “especially Forcada”, says Miguel Torres Maczassek. There is no reason why this sort of recuperation could not be undertaken all over Spain, and the Torres team have already started putting small ads in the local press in Galicia, Rioja, Ribera del Duero and Rueda. They point out that it is the less productive varieties that are most likely to have fallen out of favour because producers in the recent past have tended to be motivated more by quantity than quality.
What is particularly exciting is that a similar sort of vine-sleuthing programme could in theory be undertaken anywhere in any region with a long history of wine production. 6 Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com
Andina
Five of the best Private dining rooms
From a country pub to an intimate space in the heart of London, Andrew Webb picks dining tables with secluded charm
Piquet
Tucked away offOxford Street and seating just six,The Snug is one of the smallest private dining rooms in London.The space features decorative gesso panels, vintage furniture and classic French pewter table tops. Chef-patronAllan Pickett offers a modern European restaurant combining classic French techniques and using the best of British ingredients, with particular attention paid to his native Kent and items from his mother’s garden. 92 Newman St, London W1T 3EZ; 020 3826 4500; piquet-restaurant.co.uk
The Six Bells
This charming country pub in Suffolk has three private dining spaces. Wood-panelled walls are decorated with framed antique butterflies. Head chef John Tremayne includes local ingredients as well as those harvested from his kitchen garden. Dishes include locally shot fallow deer haunch, served with courgette, St George mushroom and polenta, or whole saltcrusted Suffolk free-range chicken with lemon and thyme stuffing, bread sauce and roast potatoes. The Street, Preston St Mary, Sudbury, Suffolk, CO10 9NG; 01787 247 440; thesixbellspreston.com
The Rosevine
A boutique hotel on the stunningCornish coast with an on-site deli and a beautiful mahogany table in the private dining room. Head chef Tim Pile’s dishes make full use of the sea and include whole grilled sole,Véronique sauce, broccoli and peppercorn sauce or grilled cod fillet, brown shrimps, spinach and Parmesan gnocchi. Near Portscatho,Truro, CornwallTR2 5EW; 01872 580206; rosevine.co.uk
Andina
If you’re after something different, this modern take on the traditional Peruvian all-day restaurant, or picanteria, has a private music room that hosts up to 22 guests. Food is served family style, and features superfood ingredients native to the PeruvianAndes paired with the best of British produce. Dishes include “ceviche Andina”, made with sea bass, sweet potato and avocado or “chancho con mani”, crispy pork belly, coriander and corn purée with peanut amarillo chilli sauce. 1 Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, London E2 7DJ; 020 7920 6499; andinalondon.com
Quill
This first-floor restaurant has a sophisticated private dining room that seats up to 20 guests.ChefCurtis Stewart’s modern British cuisine has European influences. Dishes include tuna with ponzu, miso and fermented kohlrabi, or duck with turnip, smoked garlic and hen of the woods. Of particular note is a five-course signature tasting menu. 20/22 King St, Manchester M2 6AG; 0161 832 7355; quillmcr.co.uk
AndrewWebb is the author of “Food Britannia” (Random House)
