The Guide Summer 2015

the SUMMER 2015

GUIDE A GUIDE TO BRITAIN FROM BRITAIN’S BEST GUIDES

THE PEOPLE’S HISTORIAN MICHAEL WOOD: TV PRESENTER AND WRITER

THE STORY OF BRITISH FOOD • FASHION IN LONDON & A GERMAN GEORDIE’S NEWCASTLE • LEGENDS, LIES AND LORE

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Contents 4

News Jam Session at Somerset House; Tanks a lot in Dorset; Audrey Hepburn at the National Portrait Gallery; Dreaming of the past in Margate

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Interview Television presenter Michael Wood tells Sophie Campbell about his unique approach to social history

12 Legends, Lies and Lore Fact and fiction from British history

Philippa Owen, Chair to the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides

16 A Taste of Britain

A WARM WELCOME TO ‘THE GUIDE’...

Marc Zakian looks at the history of food in the UK

26 Tour de Force Two expert guides tell us about their tours: from the punks and princesses of British fashion to industrial Newcastle

34 My Favourite…

Blue Badge Guides on stone circles, cows and canals

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26 Publisher: Guild of Registered Tourist Guides ©2015

Editor: Marc Zakian E: marczakian@blueyonder.co.uk Editorial Assistance: Mark King

T: +44 20 7403 1115

Design and print: MYPEC T: +44 113 257 9646 W: www.mypec.co.uk Display advertising: Blueprint Travel Media T: +44 1743 23 11 35

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This magazine is produced by the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides – the national association for Blue Badge Guides (the highest guiding qualification in Britain.)

Email: theguide@blue-badge.org.uk • www.britainsbestguides.org

ENGLAND

LONDON

WALES

NORTHERN IRELAND

SCOTLAND

GREEN BADGE

ISSN: 2053-0439

Front cover photo: Marc Zakian

Project Manager: Maggie Barnes-Aoussou

Every so often I make my way up a rickety wooden staircase in London’s St James. At the top is the sky-lit workshop of the wonderful milliner and Royal Warrant holder, Rachel Trevor Morgan. She has made several hats for me and I love visiting her working hideaway, it’s a reminder of the traditions of craftsmanship in British clothes-making.

In this issue, Blue Badge Guide Maitland Simpson follows this story of British fashion, from her excitement at coming from provincial Aberdeen, through the exploding, safety-pinned London Punk Rock scene, to the rise of worldrenowned UK fashion designers and the street styles of modern Britain.

A few years ago, I went to Newcastle to listen to a performance by the Northern Sinfonia. The venue was The Sage, a fantastic modern building on the industrial river Tyne. The glass concert hall was a symbol of the city’s transformation, recounted in these pages by Geordie guide Alex Jacobs, who takes us through Newcastle’s evolution from coal to culture.

Borough Market is another example of regeneration – or perhaps metamorphosis. An ancient market first recorded in the 13th century that was due to be closed in the 20th, but reborn as a now-celebrated market for foodies.

In my view, here is where you will find the best coffee, best cheese, best butcher and best pork pies in London, all within a few yards of each other. On a Saturday morning, however, the place to be is at its more recherché neighbour Spa Terminus – under a run of regenerated (that word again) railway arches. I believe that if you want to know a country, you have to know what and how its people eat – in our main feature, Marc Zakian traces the history of British food, from ancient Britain to ‘Aga Britain’.

As Chairperson of the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides, I am excited and proud that in 2015 our membership has reached its highest number since the Guild was founded in 1950, when Britain was regenerating itself after the Second World War. We now represent over 1,000 qualified guides all over the country who will share their passion and knowledge with you.

I am confident that reading this magazine will inspire you to join a tour with one of our members.

Find them on our website www.britainsbestguides.org, or call our friendly office team, who will locate the right guide for you.

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NEWS History, Culture and Events

Theresa Hunt, Blue Badge Guide, German

BLUE BADGE TOURIST GUIDES Blue Badge Tourist Guides are the official, professional tourist guides of the United Kingdom – recognised by the local tourist bodies and VisitBritain. The Blue Badge is the UK’s highest guiding qualification, awarded only after extensive training and thorough examination.

There are over 1000 Blue Badge Guides in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – each region has its own badge.

We guide in all the UK’s major tourist attractions, as well as its cities and countryside.

In 2014 Guild guides worked with over 1.5 million UK visitors The Blue Badge is the qualification of excellence in heritage guiding.

The Guild of Registered Tourist Guides is the national association of Britain’s Blue Badge guides. Since its foundation in 1950, the Guild has dedicated itself to raising and maintaining the highest professional standards.

Our guides work in the UK’s museums, galleries, churches and lead walking, cycling and driver-guided tours throughout the country. Our members work in over 30 different languages. If it can be guided, we will guide it.

To find out more or to book: +44 207 403 1115 guild@blue-badge.org.uk www.britainsbestguides.org

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WHEEL CAB COFFEE How do you get a coffee in the back of a taxi?

Turn it into an espresso bar.

That is what mobile barista Graham Buck has done with a London black cab. A year ago the former teacher bought a 1994 Austin Fairway taxi, replaced the passenger seats with an espresso maker and fitted a hatch in the roof to serve his customers.

During the last six months he has been steaming espressos for London’s flat-white aficionados at Brick Lane’s Sunday market, where the cappuccino cab has become a local photo stop.

Why a black cab? “My fiancée did a stint driving people to festivals in a vintage taxi,” he explains.“When her job finished, the cab

was standing idle. I had been thinking of opening a coffee shop – the taxi was an ideal solution.

“I built the first coffee-cab in my mum’s back-garden in Bromley, but it had no standing room, so I made the Mark II version. This one has a vintage Neapolitan espresso machine. I was a barista at university and want to serve the best coffee possible”.

Encouraged by the coffee cab’s success, Buck has expanded the fleet to include the cocktail cab that he hires out for parties and a secret new taxi that will get a ‘big reveal’ when it is ready. We are hoping it will be London’s first tea taxi.

A Dream OF THE

Margate was one of Britain’s great Victorian sea-side resorts. Its Dreamland amusement park featured a twisting, wooden roller coaster that attracted thousands of holidaymakers during its post-war heyday. But in the 90s the resort went into decline and in 2003 the funfair closed.

Now a group of locals have come together in an £18 million project to restore the historic fun park. “Dreamland

will celebrate amusement parks of the last century,” says project director Nick Laister. “Rather than just re-opening, by regenerating Margate’s seaside heritage and history we want to offer something that’s never been done before, anywhere in the world”.

Alongside the restored and retro-fitted rides from the Golden Age of British seaside holiday, there will be new rides and attractions. Dreamland will also

London’s Somerset House is staging the first major exhibition dedicated to one of the UK’s most important bands, The Jam. Their music captured life for Britain’s youth during the late 1970s and early 1980s and the show follows the trio’s journey from their Woking schooldays to 14 million global album sales.

The three members of the band have opened up their archives for the exhibition, with The Jam frontman Paul Weller’s sister curating the images. The collection includes hand-written lyrics, original stage outfits, personal photographs and footage, unreleased music videos, early scrapbooks, posters and the band’s instruments. The show is billed as ‘a unique and personal insight into the band’s trailblazing life and the retrospective legacy The Jam left on music, style, politics and culture’.

The Jam: About the Young Idea is at East Wing Galleries, Somerset House from June 26-August 31. For a guided music tour go to www.britainsbestguides.org

The Jam in London 1978 © Elaine Bryant LFI Photoshot

LONDON JAM SESSION IN THE CITY

Modern World photo shoot 19 77 © Martyn Godd ard

from around the UK

PAST

stage events celebrating the best of British culture, including concerts, film screenings and roller disco installations.

As well as the nostalgic taste of sea-side candy floss and sticks of rock, food enthusiasts will be able to try local Kent produce.

For guided tours in Kent visit: www.britainsbestguides.org

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News

Fair Lady

TANKS A LOT Dorset’s Tank Museum boasts the largest collection of military tanks in the world with 300 vehicles on show, including the UK’s oldest combat tank. Its annual summer Tankfest weekend features displays of iconic vehicles from across the globe, including two Shermans that were used in the Brad Pitt film Fury. There will be flypasts from a Second World War RAF Douglas C-47 Dakota and a Spitfire, as well as an appearance from a much-loved Rolls Royce armoured car. Tankfest takes place on the 27 and 28 June.

The National Portrait Gallery is celebrating film star Audrey Hepburn with a new photographic exhibition.

The actress trained as a ballet dancer in Notting Hill and, after a number performances as a West End chorus girl, was ‘discovered’ for the title role in the Broadway musical Gigi. Roman Holiday made her into an Oscar-winning Hollywood star, with many young women mimicking her fashionable ‘Hepburn look’.

The gallery has a personal association with Hepburn as the building space occupied by the collection’s public archive was once Ciro’s night club, where the young actress performed.

The exhibition will explore her links with London, including the role in My Fair Lady that turned Hepburn into an enduring cockney icon.

Rarely seen photographs from the family’s personal collection will be on view alongside iconic portraits of the actress by leading 20th century photographers, including Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean, Irving Penn and Norman Parkinson.

Portraits of an Icon is at the National Portrait Gallery from July 2.

For a Blue Badge guided visit of the gallery call: +44 207 403 1115

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For a military tour of the UK call: +44 207 403 1115.

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Interview: Michael Wood www.britainsbestguides.org

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Television presenter Michael Wood tells Sophie Campbell about his unique approach to social history On Michael Wood’s first day at Manchester Grammar School, his teacher made a speech.“I remember him saying that we were part of the city that had made Britain great,” he says,“not just because of its industrial strength but because of Peterloo, the Chartists, Engels, the Suffragettes, the Cooperative movement.”The school, which is 500 years old this year, had witnessed every one of them.

For Wood, it triggered a fascination with history as experienced by ordinary people, as opposed to a welldocumented elite. He has worked in television for over three decades as a writer, presenter and programme maker, using language, landscape, archaeology and DNA to drill down into the past of local communities and involve the residents – a handing back of history to the people, as it were.

Wood was born on Moss Side in 1948 and as a boy was aware that his parents, uncles and aunts had been through the Second World War. He knew there was a personal side to the great sweep of events.“I began to look into the sort of history you couldn’t really study back then,” he says,“there was a lot of wandering about Manchester and Welsh castles. You pursue that stuff because you’re interested.”

His lucky break was growing up as television entered its golden age. He was doing post-graduate studies in Anglo-Saxon history at Oriel College, Oxford when a job came up at ITV. He binned his doctorate and took it.“I needed a job and was interested in journalism,” he says, “I soon realised there were many ways of being a historian. Getting stuff out to a big audience, popularising it – that intrigued me.”

In 1980 he wrote and presented In Search of the Dark Ages for BBC2, followed by a best-selling book. He was young and personable, with a relaxed, easy style. Ten years after Kenneth Clark addressed the nation magisterially in Civilisation – A Personal View, Wood was using his reporting experience to talk about history in situ, painstakingly researching the effects of huge events on everyday lives.

The Dark Ages was followed by examinations of the Trojan War, the Domesday Book and its influence on English history, Shakespeare and Beowulf. In 2008, Christina: A Medieval Life focused on a villein living in a Hertfordshire village from the 1270s to the 1340s.“You can get things out of documents,’ he says, ‘and with Christina there was everything: wheeler-dealing, keeping the family together, retaining her inheritance on her second marriage so it would go to her kids.” Her life took place against a background of famine, war and plague.

HISTORY

FOR THE PEOPLE

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Interview: Michael Wood www.britainsbestguides.org

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This fed into his much-praised 2010 series, The Story of England, which took the village of Kibworth in Leicestershire and unpeeled the layers of its past. Villagers took part in a ‘Big Dig’, revealing copious information from Roman times to the present, via Normans, de Montfort, the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, Tudors, Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. One boy found a stone cannonball. Meanwhile, Wood was at Merton College, Oxford, studying the texts.

“I’ve always felt that TV is a kind of intermediary between scholarship and the general public,” he explains,“and in Kibworth we took one village through the whole of history using the community. It was fantastic telly. After that they got Heritage Lottery Funding for a rolling Kibworth Heritage Legacy Project. Since the series came out, millions of pounds have gone into local history projects.”

Kibworth wasn’t the only option, they considered using Downton, a village near Winchester, but Kibworth was mentioned in the Domesday Book. There was excellent documentation at Merton, documents were excellent, and what really clinched it for Wood was the industrial history.“The canals, the railways, the framework knitters – you’ve got to have the individual side as well,” he says,“and I wanted it to be Middle England, literally, out of the southeast, no BMWs.”

“In Britain, history is our most popular leisure participation activity, I think the reason is, we define ourselves by history and its effects on us” Right now he’s waiting to hear about the transmission date for his new BBC series, The Story of China, which, by his own admission, has forced him to be more structured in his approach, pre-arranging interviews and shoots. But they have used familiar techniques there to produce a number of ‘mini-Kibworths’.

“In Britain, history is our most popular leisure participation activity,” he says.“I think the reason is, we define ourselves by history and its effects on us. Look at the success of Who Do You Think You Are? History in

its broadest sense gives value and meaning to our present lives. To live without it is hard, and totalitarian regimes try to deprive you of that.

That’s where history teaching comes in.”

When asked to name his favourite historical site in Britain he’s off.“I think the new Civil War Centre in Newark is great, industrial Manchester as written about by Engels, oh and Liverpool! Just brilliant… setting, architecture… I once did a programme saying St George’s Hall was the grandest neo-classical building in Europe.”A pause.“But in the end it’s got to be Stratford-upon-Avon. I’m a Royal Shakespeare Company governor now and I just love the place. It seems miraculous we can still visit Shakespeare’s house. And that block of the King Edward VI School and 15th century almshouses and the Guildhall Shakespeare’s father knew. It’s got a grant to open to the public, they’ve already cleared the library and that opens later this year.”

And with that he’s off, to continue writing books, making television and, in his words “chuntering away in our Reithian furrow: public service broadcasting.”

Factfile For information on Michael Wood’s upcoming television work, see www.mayavisionint.com

Visit Stratford-upon-Avon with a local Blue Badge Guide www.britainsbestguides.org

“It’s seems miraculous we can still visit Shakespeare’s house. And that block of the King Edward VI School and 15th century almshouses and the Guildhall Shakespeare’s father knew “

Palmer's Cottage at Mary Arden's Farm

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The earliest written recorded use of textspeak’s favourite acronym ‘OMG’ (‘Oh My God!’) was in a letter sent to Winston Churchill. In September 1917, Admiral Lord Fisher wrote to Churchill: “I hear a new order of knighthoods is on the table. OMG (Oh My God), shower them on the Admiralty.”

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Y R O T IS H H IS IT R B M O FR N IO T FIC

was a Scottish politician and art collector who was fascinated with ancient Egypt. He arranged to be mummified after his death and paid £11,000 for an Egyptian sarcophagus to serve as his coffin. When the duke died in 1852, his mummified body was too big for the sarcophagus – according to some stories his legs were cut off so that he would fit inside.

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2015 is the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta. History tells us that in 1215 at Runnymede King John reluctantly ‘signed’ the Great Charter, which limited the power of the monarch and sowed the seeds of democracy. The only problem is that the king was most likely illiterate. What John actually did was to provide the royal seal – no signature required.

© The Graphics Fairy 2007

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Feature

Marc Zakian looks at the history of food in the UK

www.britainsbestguides.org

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What did the ancient Britons eat? If you were invited to a Stone Age feast, the menu would have included wild boar, red deer with hazelnuts, salmon, trout, frogs’ legs, blackberries and – possibly – you.

14,000 year old remains from Gough's Cave in Somerset have shown that our ancestors used human skulls as drinking cups – and that they may have indulged in cannibalism.

The communities who built Stonehenge were also enthusiastic carnivores. In 2500BC the stone circle was the focal point for communal feasts where thousands of animals were slaughtered to mark the winter solstice. People travelled from as far away as highland Scotland for a celebration that included up to a tenth of Britain’s population.

Gough’s cave skull cup © Trustees of NHM

MEAT THE ANCESTORS

The communities who built Stonehenge were also enthusiastic carnivores. In 2500BC the stone circle was the focal point for communal feasts where thousands of animals were slaughtered to mark the winter solstice 17

Cattle was king in the Iron Age when a man's wealth was measured by the size of his herd, but the Celts also planted grain for bread. Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire investigates what and how these ancient Britons cooked and ate.

“There were no written recipes two thousand years ago,” says Butser’s food historian Liz Barnes-Downing.

“The only evidence we have comes from traces of food on pottery and bog

Animal skins were the ‘Celtic milk bottle’, used to carry milk, cream and cheeses.

Iron Age cooking

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Roman kitchen in the Roman Gallery © Museum of London

Feature

HAVE YOU HERD?

bodies – ancient mummies whose last dinner is preserved in their gut”.

Liz demonstrates Celtic cookery at Butser using seasonal ingredients.

“Following a long, barren winter, people would have been screaming for greens. So in spring we make Iron Age salad with foraged nettles, goose grass, broom flower and rats’ tails [a native plantain, not a rodent’s appendage]. This is seasoned with vinegar, linseed or hazel oil.

“The main course is a stew with fava beans, spelt and barley with dried pork or mutton. For a ‘pudding’ we fry a fritter in oil or lard and flavour it with honey, birch or maple sap.

“Whenever I prepare food in one of Butser’s Iron Age roundhouses, smoke from the fire is so overbearing that I am convinced they cooked in the open air – probably eating in groups, sharing wooden eating troughs and communal ovens.

“The ovens were dug from holes in the ground and heated with fire stones. These were also used for

boiling. You can stew a whole joint of meat in a pot heated with hot stones, the skill is in making sure they don’t explode. The pot was stirred with tools made from wood, stone or bone. An ox’s shoulder blade makes a great spatula.”

Butser Farm keeps several ancient farm breeds, including Tamworth pigs and a small four-horn sheep called Manx Loaghtan. Their meat is sold from the farm shop and Liz has prepared recipe cards for anyone who wants to try ‘Celtic’ cooking at home – butserancientfarm.co.uk

Bread was the food of the masses in the Middle Ages and its cost was controlled by law. A loaf sold for a penny, its size varying according to the price of grain and quality of flour. Bakers who cheated were fined and it may be that they would add an extra loaf to an order to avoid punishment – leading to the phrase ‘a baker’s dozen’ (meaning 13).

WHAT THE ROMANS DID FOR FOOD

The Roman invasion in AD 43 brought vegetables to Britain including garlic, onion, leek, cabbage, peas and turnip.

They also introduced rabbit, chicken and pheasant and sated sweet palates with chestnuts, apples, grapes and cherries.

Roman delicacies included snails fattened on milk, peacocks' brains, flamingos' tongues and stuffed, baked dormice. The peasant population lived on a diet of bread, vegetable soup, and porridge. This would be the sorry diet of poor people right up to the 20th century.

Pottage is a thick soup that sustained people from Neolithic times to the Middle Ages. It was made from anything available to put in the pot – typically carrots, beans, oats, leeks and peas – then kept over the fire for days and topped up when needed. It is remembered in the children’s rhyme: ‘Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old’.

A POOR DIET

Roman Britain gave way to AngloSaxon England, where most people made a living from the land. English is full of words inherited from AngloSaxon peasant life: an acre was an area of land that could be ploughed in one day; a hide was sufficient land to support a family; a tun denoted a farm or estate; a cote was an animal shelter.

The Anglo-Saxons also gave us the words pig, sheep and cow. But following the Norman Conquest in 1066, ruling aristocrats used French names: mutton (mouton), venison (venaison), pork (porc) and beef (boeuf).

Society was divided: Anglo-Saxon peasants in the fields, Normans dining at the table. That legacy is reflected in modern English, with the name of the animal changing as it moves from farm to food.

Peasants lived off Mother Nature’s larder. Forests were full of edible animals: hedgehogs, whose white flesh resembled pork; red squirrels that were hunted with weighted sticks; badgers were smoked over

birchwood fires; thrush, black-bird, skylark and sparrow were caught in nets; and even dormice and rats were eaten.

Poor people rarely ate their livestock. As long as a sheep was producing wool and milk, it was too valuable to become mutton; chickens were only killed when they stopped laying eggs; oxen were the medieval tractor and cow’s milk was turned into butter or cheese. Fear of contamination meant that people didn’t drink milk unless it came straight from the cow.

Geese laid eggs and their feathers were used to stuff beds and flight the arrows that destroyed the French army at Agincourt. The bird’s fat was used in cooking and peasants kept warm by covering themselves in goose grease.

Pigs were eaten regularly. Sows and piglets fed on household slops and scavenged the forest in spring, clearing the undergrowth. In autumn, boars were slaughtered and their meat salted or smoked ready for winter. It was said you could ‘eat everything of a pig except the squeak’.

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Feature The king’s new cookhouse had more than 50 rooms, where some 200 servants would butcher, boil, and bake

FIT FOR A KING

much as two pigs. Whale was reserved for the royals and when an animal was beached, locals were obliged to send the head to the king and the tail to queen.

The Fenlands were famous for eels, so much so that the city of Ely is said to be named after the fish. The best eel was lamprey, prized for its meaty taste.

Henry I enjoyed them so much he died after eating ‘a surfeit of lampreys’.

Salmon, however, was plentiful and cheap. Merchants fed their apprentices with it so frequently that they rioted and a law had to be passed limiting salmon lunches to three a week.

The finest meat was reserved for the aristocracy. By the 13th century the monarch owned vast areas of England and peasants accused of poaching on royal land were punished by hanging, blinding or being sewn into a deerskin and The hunted by dogs. first English When a deer cookbook was The was caught it Forme of Cury. Published in was butchered 1390 it included 205 recipes. on the spot.

It’s not instructions for a Huntsmen and medieval vindaloo, cury beaters were derives from the French allowed to keep word ‘to cook’. the offal and tripe, known as What a Boar ‘umbles’ and these In 1254 King Henry III and were baked in a pie his court sat down to Christmas giving us the modern idiom: dinner that included 100 wild boar. ‘to eat humble pie’. Another Four hundred years later the king’s hog offal dish was haggis – first was gone from Britain, hunted to recorded in England in 1430. extinction. Today the beast is back. A group Fishponds were popular of boar escaped from a farm in 1999, at palaces and abbeys, as red started to breed in the wild and now meat was forbidden on fast several thousand of these 20-stone days. A single pike cost as beasts roam Kent, East Sussex, Dorset and the Forest of 20 Dean.

CABBAGES AND KINGS

During the 1530s Henry VIII rebuilt the Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court Palace. The king’s new cookhouse had more than 50 rooms, where some 200 servants would butcher, boil, and bake in what one visitor described as ‘veritable hells, such is the stir and bustle in them’.

They fed Henry’s 600 courtiers twice a day. In one year alone, king’s nobles noshed 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,300 deer, 1,870 pigs, and 53 wild boar. On feast days they were served 10 dishes, on a normal day five. By 1540 Henry VIII’s girth had expanded to 53 inches.

The image endures of a gluttonous Henry stuffing his ever-growing belly, but as Hampton Court’s food historian Marc Meltonville explains: “We have no idea what he ate, because aristocrats ate buffets. The host crammed the table with as much food as possible and the diners chose what they wanted. The message was: I am rich and choice is luxury.

“One of the luxuries was a roast. In a world where most people could not

The word venison derives from the Latin word venari meaning ‘to hunt’.

HELLO DEER

afford fresh meat, in Henry VIII’s kitchens five fires burned a ton of wood every day, roasting beef for 300 people. That is why today a ‘roast’ is still an important meal, but it is baked in an oven, not turned on a spit”.

Royal feasts demonstrated your power. When a special guest was invited, the kitchen would devise grand concoctions to impress the visitor. A cockentrice was made by sewing the upper part of a pig to the bottom part of a capon or turkey.

Another fancy was roasted peacock decorated with the bird’s bright blue feathers that were plucked then replaced after cooking – its beak gilded with gold leaf.

“The king’s cooks were creating a sort of mythical beast,” explains Marc Meltonville,“flavoured with expensive sauces and spices such as ginger and cinnamon and announced with a fanfare. It was dinner as entertainment, full of symbolism and power.

This was followed by a ‘subtlety’, such as a giant decorated marzipan boat, the Tudor equivalent of an ice sculpture.

When Oliver Cromwell abolished the royal parks in the mid-17th century, commoners hunted the ‘king’s meat’ with hungry enthusiasm, decimating Britain’s deer population. But in recent years their number has risen to two million – more than at any time since the Norman Conquest.

Woburn Abbey boasts Britain’s largest deer park with over 1400 deer roaming its 3000 acres. Richmond Park is home to 630 red and fallow deer, descendants of animals Henry VIII hunted in the 16th century.

Twice a year, the park’s qualified stalkers cull the deer to maintain a sustainable number. Wild deer is gralloched on the spot – the Gaelic word for gutting deer – and the venison then sold in farm shops, butchers and supermarkets. Every year 300,000 deer are hunted in Britain and their meat is on the menu in Lobscouse restaurants, pubs and street food markets. was a sailors’ stew, a mix of boiled, salted meat and ship’s biscuit. In the 18th with break“There was no dessert in this period, century, poorer people in the fast eaten but on special occasions the most port city of Liverpool started around important diners would retire to the eating it as a cheap dish – seven in the banqueting house; a separate building leading to Liverpudlians morning. where they were presented with being known to this day Dinner was confectioneries including boiled as Scousers. the main meal of sweets, caramels, sugared aniseeds and marzipans. The centrepiece was a giant sugar model such as St George fighting the dragon.

Sugars and spices were kept under lock and key. Ordinary people could never afford them. They were living on vegetable stews filled with leeks, beans, peas and cabbages – which, unfortunately for peasants, was one of the few things that grew all year round.”

THE BREAKFAST OF QUEENS

Breakfast was invented in the Elizabethan period. For most people this consisted of bread and butter, sometimes with eggs or sage. The wealthy ate white bread, the poor brown. The working day started at 5am,

the day. The timing depended on your status: nobles, gentlemen and scholars ate dinner at 11am, with some meals lasting up to two hours. Merchants and Londoners ate an hour later.

‘Cheap’ was the Old English word for the market. It survives in names such as Chipping Norton and Chipping Campden. Cheapside was a medieval London market, with Bread Street, Poultry and Honey Lane nearby. Stew Lane was also advertising a kind of produce, however it was not casseroles but brothels.

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Feature

In the 1830s a new way of eating came to England. Known as service à la russe, dishes were brought the table one by one, rather than being displayed on the table together. The dessert also came into fashion, the word originating from the French desservir – to remove everything from the table after each course.

The last meal was supper at 5pm.

Sumptuary laws regulated the number of dishes you were allowed to eat at one meal: a duke was permitted seven, a lord six, a merchant three.

Trade and exploration brought new foods to Elizabethan England. The first tomato was grown in London in the 1590s by John Gerard. Though he knew it was eaten in southern Europe, the herbalist believed it was poisonous and the tomato In 1633 a crowd was not of people gathered widely used outside a herbalist’s shop until the in Smithfield, London. They mid-18th had come to see an exciting century. new fruit from Bermuda: There is a England’s first bunch of legend that bananas.

Sir Walter Raleigh presented a potato plant to Queen Elizabeth I. The royal cooks tossed out the tubers and cooked the poisonous stems and leaves, making everyone so ill that the potato was banned from court. Though this is probably a myth, the potato only became popular in Britain during the Industrial Revolution.

Elizabethans could buy foods that had been luxuries a century earlier and merchant’s kitchens were full of peppers, almonds, dates, olives from

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Greece, French capers, cucumbers, figs and sugar. Some histories record that Good Queen Bess loved sugared food so much that all her teeth fell out.

A BEEF WITH THE FRENCH

French cuisine had an enormous influence on English food. George, Prince of Wales employed the UK’s first international celebrity chef, Marie Antoine Carême in the kitchen at his Royal Pavilion in Brighton.

Carême introduced the elaborate grande cuisine style of cooking and fancy French dishes became known as ‘kickshaws’, from quelquechose, French for ‘something’.

English food fought back with its signature dish, roast beef. Celebrated in 18th century painting by Hogarth and in the ballad The Roast Beef of Old England it was the symbol of resistance against the ‘old enemy’.

The dish became so synonymous with England that a French nickname for the English is les Rosbifs.

Beefsteak Clubs opened – expensive male dining establishments, where dukes and judges gorged on roasts. This diet led to the upper classes becoming rather portly: the politician Charles Fox was so rotund he had to have a circle cut from his table at his club and Prince George – who ate three beefsteaks and two pigeons at breakfast – was

mockingly dubbed the ‘Prince of Whales’.

The poor ate at cookshops: steamy cellars on the backstreets and alleys of London that served boiled beef, stews and suet pudding to London’s carriage drivers, porters and footmen.

The 1700s saw a new dish gracing wealthy tables, the dessert. A mini Ice Age ushered in the ice house, a building where frozen pond water could be kept until summer.

“Georgian cooks took advantage of this by making fruit and custard ices,” explains Marc Meltonville.

“They were made in a sorbetière, a tube of pewter rotated in ice until the mixture froze. This was then tipped into a decorative mould”.

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CAN DO

A SHORE THING

The steam engine led to a food “We survive on this planet because of revolution in the Victorian city. Seafood oysters,” says food expert Drew Smith. was rushed to London on ‘perishables’ “They are older than humans, older trains; by the 1870s, 300 tons of Cornish than grass. The Stone Age diet was 80% fish was arriving in the capital every day. oyster and shells were used in building Early morning milk trains brought dairy and scattered on the ground as an from Welsh pastures and Buckingham ancient burglar alarm. fields to the city’s breakfast tables.

“Oysters were the McDonalds of The tin can was invented in England Victorian Britain. They were cheap and in 1810. Tins of Fray Bentos corned beef everywhere, the 19th century pub crossed the Atlantic from Argentina and snack, pickled to go with your pint.” the meat was sliced into the working London boasted 3000 different oyster man’s packed lunch. Canned peaches, sellers hawking them at a penny (1d) apricots and pineapples from California for three. Beef and meant that many could now eat fruit oyster pie was a all year round. classic dish.

Hammerton White was in fashion. A The poorer microbrewery in Glasgow mill worked out how you were, London’s Islington to make cheap, white flour and the more produces an oyster stout. the healthy brown loaf was, oysters you Reviving a recipe brewed a literally, sifted out. In Liverpool, put in. century earlier, the beer is Henry Tate developed a new Then the flavoured with fresh refining technique to increase see-saw Maldon oysters. the yield of white sugar that Tate & tipped. Meat Lyle sold in profitably dainty cubes. became less Convenience food arrived with the costly, shellfish invention of self-raising flour, baking became a rich man’s food and and custard powder, gelatine our overfished English oyster went into blancmange, dried milk, egg powder, decline. But now the only food that is tinned milk, condensed milk, stock eaten alive is fighting back; one Jersey cubes and breakfast cereals. farm is producing two million flat Food was no longer made, it native-English oysters a year for the was manufactured. Kitchen new seafood bars and restaurants that work became easier, but for are springing up throughout the In Victorian authentic, healthy British country. markets it was cuisine, it was a difficult Whitstable has been the home of the possible to rent a moment. It would take English oyster since Roman times. The bone for making another century for chefs 15th century Whitstable Oyster Fishery soup. and food enthusiasts to Company claims to be Europe's oldest rediscover the best traditions of surviving commercial enterprise. In the English food.

1850s they shipped 80 million shellfish a

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year to London's Billingsgate Market. On 23rd July, the town will host its annual nine-day Whitstable Oyster Festival, with history walks, crab-catching and oystereating competitions.

A DICKENS OF A TIME

Michael, Adam and Dominic are bringing Victorian cookery back to the London. In 2010 these three school friends left their office jobs to start What the Dickens – a novel street food company specialising in 19th century grub.

“Victorians had a taste for ‘devilling’,” says Michael.“Our signature dish is devilled pork: roasted shredded meat, spiced with mustard, chutney and Worcestershire sauce. And we make devilled kidneys, a typical 19th century breakfast dish flavoured with Worcestershire sauce, mustard, butter, cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper.

“Kedgeree came to Britain with colonials returning from India. In the days before refrigeration, it was a way of turning yesterday’s leftovers into a filling breakfast. It’s made with fish (traditionally haddock), rice, boiled eggs, butter and curry powder.

“These dishes were served at home.

On the streets, Victorians ate boiled pigs’ trotters, eels and oysters – foods that are now expensive or too challenging for modern taste.”

This year, What the Dickens were finalists in BBC’s Food and Farming Awards. The trio are researching new recipes, championing them in street markets across the capital and planning a series of Victorian dining experiences at a number of grand houses. Go to: whatthedickensfood.com

“Oysters were the McDonalds of Victorian Britain. They were cheap and everywhere”

Factfile Why not explore Britain’s remarkable food heritage with a visit to historic sights such as Stonehenge, Hampton Court, Whitstable, Tate Galleries or the Museum of London in the expert company of a Blue Badge Guide. For more information visit: www.britainsbestguides.org

SOLE FOOD

In 1860 Joseph Malin, a young Jewish boy, started Britain’s first fish and chip shop in east London. It quickly became Britain’s national dish and by the 1930s there was a fish and chip shop on almost every city street.

Fish and chips were kept off ration in the First and Second World Wars, Prime Minister Churchill referred to them as ‘Good Companions’. During

the ‘D-Day’ landings British soldiers identified each other by calling ‘fish’ – the response was ‘chips’.

Today there are over 10,000 fish and chip shops across the country, it’s the biggest selling fast food in Britain. The oldest working restaurant is London’s Rock and Sole Plaice, founded in 1871. This year’s winner of the annual Fish and Chip Shop Awards is Frankie’s Fish & Chips from Brae in Shetland.

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Tour de force Words: Marc Zakian

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Maitland Simpson takes us on a walk following the journey of British fashion

FROM PUN

Alexander McQueen dress © V&A Museum

Once a year Maitland Simpson’s kitchen table becomes an improvised catwalk for a re-enactment of an iconic moment in British fashion.“A friend and I dress up in a pair of Vivienne Westwood shoes, identical to the ones worn by Naomi Campbell when she fell over at Paris Fashion Week. We strut up and down the table without a slip.” Maybe Westwood should give Maitland a call for her next show.

She is certainly no stranger to the public eye.

At Edinburgh University, Maitland formed a new-wave rock band with a mate. This earned her a gig as a backing singer for the Rezillos and in 1978 she found herself on the BBC music show Top of the Pops.

“My very brief ‘music career’ resulted in me re-taking my university exams,” says Maitland.

“But punk gave me a sense of freedom and identity, a chance for me to look different from my hippy-style cousins back home in Aberdeen”.

Following her short-lived brush with celebrity, she worked for charity organisations, married and travelled. Then, in 2010 when Maitland qualified as a London Blue Badge Guide, she decided to combine her passion for street style, clothes and history.

“Fashion tells the story of social status. In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum there is a collection of Tudor women’s corsets. Some fasten at the back, some the front. Nothing remarkable about that – except that if you were rich you had servants to fasten you up at the back; if you were poor you had a front-closing corset.

“Victorian corsets were designed to create a tiny waist. They were so tight that some women fainted and there are even stories of fatalities. If

the corseting didn’t kill you, the fashionable new magenta dyes made with arsenic would leach poison around your collar.

“For centuries British women’s fashion design was conducted from the wealthy streets of Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge was once home to over 30 millinery shops. Today there is just one survivor: John Boyd. The 90 year-old started work in the post-war period, when clothing material was rationed and Boyd would improvise by decorating his hats with wire wool unravelled from kitchen scouring pads.

“He has designed headwear for nearly all the royals including Princesses Margaret and Anne and – famously – Diana’s going-away hat following her wedding. It takes three weeks to design and make the pieces which he hand finishes. I am hanging on to my personal Boyd hat – it is a collector’s item.

“Boyd belongs to the generation of clothes designers whose post-war aristocratic styles defined women’s fashion. Norman Hartnell opened his shop on Bruton Street in the 1930s, near the house where the future Queen Elizabeth II was born. In 1947 he designed her wedding gown. This was England’s most talked about dress and a concerned public sent in their clothing ration coupons to make sure there was enough material to make an outfit fit for a princess. The gifts had to be returned, as it was illegal for another person to use them.

“But Mayfair’s old-school fashions were about to be swept away by a road that defined a new era in British fashion: Carnaby Street. People stopped dressing like their mum and dad, the

KS TO PRINCESSES

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Tour de force

“Boyd belongs to the generation of clothes designers, whose post-war aristocratic styles defined women’s fashion”

Boyd Hat

royals were replaced by Rock‘n’Roll and shops became boutiques. The goddess of the Street was Mary Quant, who gave the name to the mini-skirt, saying: ‘if you couldn’t afford a Mini car, wearing a mini-dress gave you the same sense of freedom’.

“Biba was the defining 1960s boutique. Everyone wanted to be a Biba girl, with free flowing clothes, wavy hair and huge eyes. When I was

John Boyd

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12, my mum took me on my first trip to London. We went to Biba where she bought an ostrich feather boa and a pink and black dress. Compared to the conservative clothes of my Aberdeen aunties, these were exotic items that I longed to wear.

“In 1974 on London’s Kings Road a provocative challenge to Biba’s hippy culture appeared. Announcing itself with a pink foam rubber sign saying ‘SEX’, this was the unofficial headquarters for the British punk movement. The shop sold clothes collected and designed by Malcolm McLaren and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood.

“I spent a lost weekend at ‘SEX’ in the late 1970s. During an appearance with the Revillos on Top of the Pops I made friends with a cage dancer from the show. We visited the shop together and somehow she ended up marrying Billy Idol.

“Dame Vivienne Westwood is now the grand lady of British fashion.

Though an internationally recognised designer, she hasn’t forgotten her punk roots – she cycles to her Mayfair shop in platform heels and collected her OBE knickerless.

“Westwood paved the way for a new generation of British designers, but their great champion is Joan Bernstein, or Mrs B as she’s affectionately known.

Her South Molton Street store opened in 1970 and fostered design talents

such as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane.

“Alexander McQueen combined two great British traditions: tailoring skills learned on Savile Row and a rebellious bondage aesthetic. He pioneered the revealing low-slung bumster trousers at the same time as using slashings, a fashion that originated in the Tudor period.

“Stella McCartney also learned to tailor on Savile Row, where her Beatles father is one of the street’s most prestigious clients. She rose to fame designing Madonna’s wedding dress and Team GB’s 2012 Olympic outfits.

Known as ‘Stella Steel’ for her tough business skills, she has pioneered ethical fashion.

“Christopher Kane is a Scottish designer who has just opened in Mayfair. Kylie Minogue wears his clothes. He is the UK’s Versace, combining gaffer tape, cables and lace with traditional Scottish materials such as cashmere.

“These designers have mixed the tailoring traditions of Savile Row and Mayfair with UK street style to turn British fashion into an international business. At the same time they have made London into the ideal city for dedicated followers of fashion.”

For a fashion tour with Maitland email: maitlandsimpson@hotmail.co.uk

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Alex Jacobs tells us how the industrial city of Newcastle upon Tyne went from coal to culture

THE GERMAN GEORDIE Alex Jacobs calls himself a ‘German Geordie’, a man with roots in two great industrial cities. “My grandfather was a coach driver from County Durham,“ he explains.“During a bus tour of England he befriended a German tourist and kept boasting to the visitor about his wonderful daughter.

“Keen to meet her, the young man returned to Britain, driving all the way from Germany to Consett in a Volkswagen Beetle. When my mum answered the door he declared: ‘I have heard all about you’. It was love at first sight, but the man had to spend several nights sleeping in the car before he was finally admitted to the house. He returned to Germany, but after 731 letters and two years separation, they finally married.”

The German joined his wife in Newcastle and learned Geordie English. But this was the 70s, industry was on the decline in the North East, so the couple moved to the Dortmund area where Alex was born.

Alex regularly visited his Newcastle grandparents and as he grew older he brought his friends with him.“We were fascinated by the industrial landscape, a city trying to reinvent itself. I thought it would be great if there was a young guide who could explain it all.”Alex moved to Newcastle, and in 2008, age 27, qualified as the youngest Blue Badge Guide in the country.

“Many people think of Newcastle as a city made by the Industrial Revolution,”says Alex,“but the Romans built a fort and bridged the river here in 122AD. They wanted to safeguard the magic mineral that has defined the city’s history: coal.

“Centuries later, in 1085, the conquering William I sent his son to build a ‘new castle’ by the river – giving the city its modern name. The fortress protected medieval mining interests and Newcastle became so strongly associated with

Alex moved to Newcastle, and in 2008, age 27, qualified as the youngest Blue Badge Guide in the country

Swingbridge, Quayside

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Tour de force â&#x20AC;&#x153;By turning mills into galleries, steel into statues and engineering into public art, Newcastle has become a place that surprises visitorsâ&#x20AC;?

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The Sage

coal that it gave birth to the idiom: ‘coals to Newcastle’.

“By the 18th century there were a thousand collieries in the area, but transporting tons of coal from the mines to Newcastle and beyond was a problem. The solution came from the sooty Tyne Valley pit village of Wylam.

“George Stevenson was the illiterate son of a Wylam mining family. As a young boy he worked down the pit, but at 17 he educated himself at night school. Stephenson had heard that the Wylam pit was trying to develop a steam locomotive and he was determined to build a better engine. In 1814 he completed the Blucher, a locomotive that could pull thirty tons up a hill at four miles per hour.

“Stevenson went on to become 'the father of the railways', masterminding the Stockton & Darlington railway that linked the collieries with the River Tees and, in 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway – the first intercity passenger steam railway line in the world – powered by the legendary Rocket.

“The forgotten man in this story was Wylam-born blacksmith Timothy Hackworth. He built a locomotive that took part in the trials to provide the train engine for the Liverpool to Manchester Railway. After a promising start, Hackworth’s locomotive suffered a cracked cylinder – a part that had been cast in George Stephenson’s workshop. We will never know if this was sabotage, but railway engineering was, literally and metaphorically, a dirty business.

“William Armstrong is another Newcastle hero. He designed a hydraulic crane that could unload ships quickly and cheaply. He developed a revolutionary cannon used by the British army in the Crimean War and sold armaments to both sides during the American Civil War. It is said that his company built the entire fleet for the Japanese Navy.

“There is one more Geordie genius I have to mention.

History tells us that in 1879 Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, but Edison’s bulb was a development of the original light devised by Joseph Swan. Swan demonstrated the invention in 1878 and his house was the first in the world to

The Angel of the North

be lit by a light bulb. In 1881, thanks to Swan, the Savoy Theatre in London became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity.”

This Geordie ingenuity, combined with iron ore, coal and the river meant that by 1840s nearly half of the world’s ships were made on the Tyne or Wear. But ship building declined and in the 1900s the collieries started to close; in 1994 Wearmouth Colliery, the last working Durham mine, shut – today it’s the site of Sunderland football club's Stadium of Light.

“The people felt let down and unemployment blighted the region, but Geordies are resilient and the city started to reinvent itself. In 1998 an unexpected symbol of hope appeared alongside the main road into Newcastle.

“A 20 metre tall art work of an angel with 54 metre wide wings seems an unlikely candidate to change perceptions in an industrial city. Antony Gormley’s statue attracted plenty of criticism – spending £700,000 on a statue in a city in crisis seemed like a giant waste of money. But, like the statue’s steel that is designed to change over time, people’s feelings about The Angel of the North have gone from bewilderment to affection, and the ‘The Gateshead Flasher’ or ‘Rusty Annie’ is nowadays as much a part of Newcastle as the Tyne.

“A wasteland of deserted warehouses during the 1980s, the city’s dockside is a new focal point for the city. Three projects in particular have come to symbolise this: the Baltic is a former flour mill that reopened as a contemporary art gallery; the Sage is a riverside concert venue designed in 2004 by Norman Foster and is home to the Northern Symphonia; and the Millennium Bridge across the Tyne is the world’s first tilting pedestrian bridge.

“By turning mills into galleries, steel into statues and engineering into public art, Newcastle has become a place that surprises visitors. It’s a great example of a British postindustrial city. I live right on the river Tyne in a converted Victorian warehouse – when I look out my window, there is the new Newcastle.”

For a tour of Newcastle with Alex Jacobs visit www.northernsecrets.co.uk

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MY FAVOURITE

Blue Badge Guides show you their favourite places around the UK

...COW ...is a charming animal that is more than just an emblem of Jerseyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agricultural history; for many of our visitors they are an iconic welcome to the island.

Insatiably curious, the Jersey cow will happily approach anyone who stands nearby. And, of course, once the memory of meeting these doe-eyed characters has faded, a taste of the creamy milk, yogurt or ice cream produced from their world-famous milk brings back the moment.

Arthur Lamy, Jersey Blue Badge Guide arthur@arthurthebluebadgeguide.com

...STONE CIRCLE ...is Castlerigg in the Lake District. Just outside Keswick, it makes a great photo stop on a lovely day. It is much smaller than Stonehenge, of course, but dates from roughly the same time (2-3000 BC) and you may walk in among the stones and gain a feel for early man attempting to communicate with his gods. There are also great views of the Lakeland countryside from this spot.

Eddie Lerner, London Blue Badge, edwinlerner@gmail.com

...CANAL ...is just a few minutes stroll from the Roman and Georgian attractions of Bath. The Kennet and Avon (the K&A) was completed in 1810, shortening the journey from London to Bath and on to Bristol via the River Avon. Coal and domestic goods came into the city, Bath stone and beer went out. Then the railway arrived and by 1920 commercial traffic had ceased, the canal's condition deteriorated and long stretches were closed. A dogged group of enthusiasts drove a restoration programme and in 1990 the K&A was re-opened â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it provides a welcome source of leisure whether you are on foot, bicycle or water.

Mike Rowland South West Blue Badge mcr306@yahoo.co.uk

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