The charitable organisation, Common Ground, launched ‘Apple Day’ in 1990 to mark local distinctiveness by linking the fruit we eat with the people who grow it and the places they make in the process. It was a spectacular success and an energising and inspirational experience for those who took part in that first Apple Day held in London’s Covent Garden.
Apple Day is now a national event and Common Ground’s most triumphant achievement in their defence of diversity and promotion of the importance of local identity. Its founders, Sue Clifford and Angela King have also been highly influential in regional planning, environmental issues, tourism and heritage projects to name but a few. England is not only rich in apples but also landscapes, buildings and people, in which the Common Ground perspective sees value and meaning. These have been gathered into this splendid directory – ‘England in Particular’. It commences with an alphabetic list of rules for distinctiveness, that applies to orchards as much as to villages, structures and concepts. Here is a small sample – ‘Fight for AUTHENTICITY and integrity. Keep places lived in, worked in and real.’ ‘EATING should be a creative act. Buy local and in season.’ ‘The LAND is sacred in many cultures … All of our surroundings are important to someone.’
Fruits, of course, feature in this weighty volume along with, for example, cheese rolling, corn dollies, cricket and crinkle crankle walls. Turn to any page and you are immediately among an extraordinary juxtaposition of foods, customs and events – ‘Eccles Cakes’ and ‘Eels’; ‘Glow Worms’ and ‘Gooseberries’; and ‘Wells’ and ‘Wem Sweet Pea Show’. The Westmorland damson is mentioned, as are Taymar cherries and Black Worcester pear, but I was disappointed that the National Fruit Collections itself did not merit an entry. The Collections, at Brogdale in Kent, have been at the heart of the revival of interest in local fruits, providing samples and graft wood to inspire and create the new orchards. They are such a uniquely English phenomenon. Nowhere else in the world has as diverse and fully documented collection of fruits growing one site, it deserves a place surely in any celebration of the distinctive. This aside the book is packed with facts and charm and illustrated with numerous and different styles of line drawings contributed by many artists. Strongly recommended, this will long be a guide to the multiplicity of things that make up the individual character of our regions and localities.
Joan Morgan
Book details: England in Particular; A celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive by Sue Clifford and Angela King with Gail Vines, Darren Giddings and Kate O’Farrell for Common Ground; published by Hodder & Stoughton, 2006; £30; 512 pp; numerous black & white line drawings.
