The Streets Of Old London
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Piccadilly, c. 1900
In my mind, I live in old London as much as I live in the contemporary London of here and now. Maybe I have spent too much time looking at photographs of old London – such as these glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute?
Old London exists to me through photography almost as vividly as if I had actual memory of a century ago. Consequently, when I walk through the streets of London today, I am especially aware of the locations that have changed little over this time. And, in my mind’s eye, these streets of old London are peopled by the inhabitants of the photographs.
Yet I am not haunted by the past, rather it is as if we Londoners in the insubstantial present are the fleeting spirits while – thanks to photography – those people of a century ago occupy these streets of old London eternally. The pictures have frozen their world forever and, walking in these same streets today, my experience can sometimes be akin to that of a visitor exploring the backlot of a film studio long after the actors have gone.
I recall my terror at the incomprehensible nature of London when I first visited the great metropolis from my small city in the provinces. But now I have lived here long enough to have lost that diabolic London I first encountered in which many of the great buildings were black, still coated with soot from the days of coal fires.
Reaching beyond my limited period of residence in the capital, these photographs of the streets of old London reveal a deeper perspective in time, setting my own experience in proportion and allowing me to feel part of the continuum of the ever-changing city.
Ludgate Hill, c. 1920
Holborn Viaduct, c. 1910
Woman selling fish from a barrel, c. 1910
Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, c. 1920
Throgmorton St, c. 1920
Highgate Forge, Highgate High St, 1900
Bangor St, Kensington, c. 1900
Ludgate Hill, c. 1910
Walls Ice Cream Vendor, c. 1920
Ludgate Hill, c. 1910
Strand Yard, Highgate, 1900
Eyre St Hill, Little Italy, c. 1890
Muffin man, c. 1910
Seven Dials, c. 19o0
Fetter Lane, c. 1910
Piccadilly Circus, c. 1900
St Clement Danes, c. 1910
Hoardings in Knightsbridge, c. 1935
Wych St, c.1890
Dustcart, c. 1910
At the foot of the Monument, c. 1900
Pageantmaster Court, Ludgate Hill, c. 1930
Holborn Circus, 1910
Cheapside, 1890
Cheapside ,1892
Cheapside with St Mary Le Bow, 1910
Regent St, 1900
Glass slides copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
William Oglethorpe, Cheesemaker
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William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey
Everyone knows Cheddar, Stilton, Wensleydale and Caerphilly, but there is an unexpected new location on the cheese map of Great Britain. It is Bermondsey and the man responsible is William Oglethorpe – seen here bearing his curd cutter as a proud symbol of his domain, like a medieval king wielding a mace of divine authority.
When photographer Tom Bunning & I went along to Kappacasein Dairy under the railway arches beneath the main line out of London Bridge in the early morning to investigate this astonishing phenomenon, we entered the humid warmth of the dairy in eager anticipation and encountered an expectant line of empty milk churns.
Already Bill had been awake since quarter to four. He had woken in Streatham then driven to Chiddingstone in Kent and collected six hundred litres of milk. Beyond us, in a separate room with a red floor and a large glass window sat a hundred-year-old copper vat containing that morning’s delivery of milk, which was still warm. Bill with his fellow cheesemakers Jem and Agustin, dressed all in white, worked purposefully in this chamber, officiating like priests over the holy process of conjuring cheese into existence. I stood mesmerised by the sight of the pale buttery liquid swirling against the gleaming copper as Bill employed his curd cutter, manoeuvring it through the milk as you might turn an oar in a river.
Taking a narrow flexible strip of metal, he wrapped a cloth around it so that the rest extended behind like a flag. Holding each end of the strip and grasping the corners of the cloth, Bill leaned over the vat plunging his arms deep down into the whey. When he lifted the cloth again, Agustin reached over with practised ease to take two corners of the cloth as Bill removed the sliver of metal and – hey presto! – they were holding a bundle of cheese, dredged from the mysterious depth of the vat. It was as spellbinding as any piece of magic I have ever seen.
“Cheesemaking is easy, it’s life that is hard,” Bill admitted to me with a disarming grin, when I joined the cheesemakers for their breakfast at a long table and he revealed the long journey he had travelled to arrive in Bermondsey. “I grew up in Zambia,” he explained, “And one day a Swiss missionary came to see my father and asked if I’d like to go to agricultural school in Switzerland.”
“I earned a certificate of competence,” he added proudly, assuring me with a wink, “I’m a qualified peasant.” Bill learnt to make cheese while working on a farm in Provence with a friend from agricultural college. “It was simply a way to sell all the milk from the goats, we made a cheese the same way the other farmers did,” he informed me, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
Bill took me through to the next railway arch where his cheeses are stored while they mature for up to a year. He cast his eyes lovingly over the neat flat cylinders each impressed with word ‘Bermondsey’ on the side. Every Wednesday, the cheeses are attended to. According to their type, they are either washed or stroked, to spread the mould evenly, and they are all turned before being left to slumber in the chilly darkness for another week.
It was while working for Neal’s Yard Dairy that Bill decided to set up on his own as cheese maker. Today, Kappacasein is one of handful of newly-established dairies in London producing distinctive cheeses and bypassing the chain of mass production and supermarkets to distribute on their own terms and sell direct to customers. Yet Bill chooses to be self-deprecating in his explanation of why he is making cheese in London. “It’s just because I can’t buy a farm,” he claims, shrugging in enactment of his role of the peasant in exile, cast out from the rural into the urban environment.
“I’m interested in transformation,” Bill confided to me, turning serious as he reached his hand gently down into the vat and lifted up a handful of curds, squeezing out the whey. These would form the second cheese to come from the vat that morning, a ricotta. All across the surface, nodules of cheese were forming, coming into existence as if from primordial matter. “I don’t want to interfere,” Bill continued, thinking out loud and growing philosophical as he became absorbed in observing the cheese form, “Nature’s that much more complicated – if you let it do its own thing that’s much interesting to me than trying to impose anything. It’s about finding an equilibrium with Nature.”
Let me confess I had an ulterior motive for being there. One day, I ate a slice of Bill’s Bermondsey cheese and became hooked. It was a flavour that was tangy and complex. One piece was not enough for me. Two pieces were not enough for me. Eventually, I had to seek the source of this wonder and there it was in front of me at last – the Holy Grail of London cheese in Bermondsey.
Cutting the curd
The curds
Squeezing the curds
Scooping out the cheese
The second batch of cheese from the whey is ricotta
Jem Kast, Cheese Maker
Ana Rojas, Yoghurt Maker
Agustin Cobo, Cheese Maker
The story of cheese
William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey
Photographs copyright © Tom Bunning
Visit KAPPACASEIN DAIRY, 1 Voyager Industrial Estate, Bermondsey, SE16 4RP
Gillian Tindall In Ship Tavern Passage
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Remembering writer and historian Gillian Tindall who died on 1st October, I am publishing her account of her first job in a bookshop in Ship Tavern Passage in the City of London in the fifties.
Gillian Tindall in the fifties
I was born in London but the blitz of the Second World War intervened too soon for me to have retained any memory of the house of my birth. Like most of the London babies and children of my generation I was bundled off to the countryside, in my case Sussex.
With the passing years this became my place of childhood. For though most of London had not been comprehensively wrecked by German bombs, the notion persisted for a good ten years after the war that most of it was only fit for redevelopment. London was admittedly very dirty still in that time of open fires before Clean Air Acts and the disappearance of steam trains. I remember my seven-year-old surprise – on a rare London visit one spring – at seeing how green the new leaves were in the parks. I was used to the joys of primrose and bluebells in the country, but against the sooty black town branches that ‘came off’ on your hands (“Darling, I told you not to touch!”) these London leaves amazed me with their delicate beauty.
In other respects London seemed a compelling but faintly sinister place, wonderfully busy with huge shops, tall buses and taxis hailed ‘for a treat,’ yet reputedly full of ‘slums’ that I never managed to locate. My mother wore a hat and her best coat when going ‘up to Town,’ yet sometimes I would glimpse in dark doorways or down side-streets people far shabbier and stranger than any to be seen in our country village. I longed to explore further.
The years passed and everything changed. My mother was dead, we moved house, and I found myself living near Hampstead Heath with my father. Grocery shopping and cooking in the intervals of working for a college entrance exam suited me fine, and my exploring project took off. But once the exam was done there was a vague feeling I ought to have a job. This was the modernity of the fifties: goodness me, a girl should not be hanging round at home, poor dear! A job was found for me in a bookshop off Gracechurch St in the City of London and, for a mercifully brief period in my life, I joined the inexorable morning and evening tide of rush hour travel.
Neither the bookshop nor its two other branches exist any more. Several years after my brief sojourn there it collapsed with, what I have been told, was an impressive backlog of debt and mismanagement. Indeed, even to my utterly ignorant perceptions, it seemed rather chaotically run. It was in Ship Tavern Passage which led into one end of Leadenhall Market and still does, though the alley as I knew it is gone. The market is flourishing still, if somewhat transformed. Its elaborate columns and façades beautified with dark red paint and gilding. The tempting meat and vegetable stalls that I remember and the one sandwich bar – to which I gratefully escaped for a late snack when lunch-hour customers had returned to their offices – have gone, to be replaced by restaurants and wine bars. The sole remaining old building in Ship Tavern Passage is, confusingly, an inn called the Swan (which I am told was only saved in 1985 from the developers’ wrecking ball by a last minute protest). The site that was occupied by the bookshop where I worked and by its modest neighbouring shops is now covered by the corporate architecture of Marks & Spencer.
I liked talking to customers about the books they were seeking, though many of these seemed to be allocated monthly by a national membership organisation, an institutional precursor to modern, informal book clubs. (Why – if these volumes were for members at a special rate – they had to be obtained in a bookshop puzzles me today. But so it was. The standard price for a hardback was seven shillings and sixpence, and there were relatively few paperbacks). However, my task – according to the dragon-lady who was head-assistant – was to dust the books full-time, since soot still reigned everywhere. I remember my forearms being permanently grey, for I soon learned to push up the sleeves of the black jersey I seem to have worn every day. The habit, though not the jersey, has remained with me for life.
In the basement was a less prestigious department where china was sold (a bad sign in a bookshop, as I now know) and pictures were brought in to be framed. Sometimes I would be sent down there, where I was terrorised by an ever-returning customer who was enraged that the picture he had left for framing had disappeared. In vain, would I repeat to him that it was nothing to do with me, while the other assistant (who knew nothing of the picture either and talked to me of little else beside her secret and exciting extra-marital affaire) hid in the stock-room. Once, I was rescued from the furious customer by a grander and much nicer lady than the dragon upstairs. She was the buyer for books, who used to take refuge in the basement to avoid being overwhelmed by publishers’ reps.
I was paid £5 a week cash in a small brown envelope, handed to me by a pay-clerk who for some reason disapproved of me – or perhaps just of life and his own circumstances. This modest sum would have been just enough for me to live on week to week, bed-sitters and fares both then being extraordinarily cheap. But as I was living at home with my father my wage was all – apart from the small cost of sandwiches – spending money. Only it was very difficult then in the City to buy the sort of things girls needed, such as stockings, underclothes and hair-ribbons. Even though ‘lady-typists’ had been a known species for most of the twentieth century, the Square Mile remained a preserve of men in three-piece suits and bowler hats.
I had got onto terms with only small segments of London and the City not at all, as I scuttled between Liverpool St tube station and Ship Tavern Passage, afraid of being late and incurring the dragon’s displeasure. Yet occasionally the nicer lady would suggest that I be sent on an errand to one of the big banks in Lombard St with – what I can only suppose – were the day’s takings, in a small canvas bag. Security did not seem to have been an issue in those peace-seeking, post-war times.
I enjoyed these outings into the sparrow-populated, starling-haunted streets, that were still lined with heavy Victorian buildings, not a glass tower in sight. But how ignorant I was! As I went by, Mary Woolnoth’s bell would chime – ‘with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.‘ I had barely heard of TS Eliot then, let alone that he passed eight years in his thirties in tedious bank-employment just there, or had I any idea that he would become for me the prince of poets, haunting much of my adult work on place and history.
I also do not think I knew that a year or two before a temple of Mithras had been unearthed on a building site not far off, and was even then being laboriously (and rather ineptly) removed for re-erection at a different site nearby. I certainly did not know (since no one else seemed to then either) that the space which became Leadenhall Market was once the heart of the Roman basilica and forum, constructed in the first century AD. Its ruins were uncovered in 1881, when the iron structure of the Victorian market was going up. Only recently has it been confirmed that this was indeed the forum, the epicentre of judicial and financial administration. Some of the ruins are there to this day, carefully preserved in the basement of an upmarket gentlemen’s barbers, Nicholson & Griffin, on the corner of Gracechurch St.
I should like to go back to the old, unpretentious Leadenhall Market and the days when a cup of tea cost tuppence ha’penny and a cup of weak coffee thripence because coffee was posher. I should like to go back to the time when tube fares too were in pennies and no-one but the drunks round Spitalfields slept in the streets, because the newspapers every evening had columns and columns of attics and basements and little backrooms to rent for tiny weekly amounts.
I should not like to go back to being that dreamy girl in a grubby black jersey, a duffle coat and ‘ballet-slippers,’ who knew nothing much about anything and had all her life before her. However alarming various different national and world trends seem to be, and however tiresome it is for me no longer being able to walk all day round London (after a lifetime of doing this my over-used feet hurt and I get too tired), I think I should much rather be the me of today. Life has been satisfactory, and sometimes wonderful, but I do not want the labour of starting it all over again.
Ship Tavern Passage off Gracechurch St as portrayed by Henrie Pitcher in 1911 yet it was unaltered in the fifties when Gillian Tindall first knew it
Ship Tavern Passage today
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The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.
For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.
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Seen By Meg Khan
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Zinat Abdullah, Florence St 5:40pm 20/01/21
Photographer Meg Khan has been documenting East Londoners since 2020, creating a panoramic collection of vivid images and stories entitled SEEN. Here you can see my selection from more than four hundred portraits she has taken over the past five years, all of which are to be found on her website.
Meg described the genesis of her burgeoning project to me: ‘In 2020, when the world came to a sudden halt I sat notebook in hand on my balcony, writing the names of everyone I knew. An idea I had carried in my heart for some time found room to surface. One by one, over the coming days and weeks, I worked my way through the list sharing my desire to meet, to sit opposite one another, for the storyteller in me to see the storyteller in them.’
Charlotte Lynch, Power League 12:10pm 19/09/22
Common Room, Hackney Downs Studios 2:45pm 6/02/23
Costakis Costa, Mario’s Leyton High Rd 6pm 22/06/24
Loho, Islington Tunnel 12:10pm 8/06/21
Mahrukh Samdani Khan (Ma), here now always
Luke Norton, Courtenay Mews 1:05pm 21/01/22
Charlotte Bracegirdle, Leyton 12:29pm 1/03/22
Virgilus Nwosu, London Aquatics Centre 4:36pm 19/02/2021
Gazza Saleem, Leyton Orient Stadium 10:54pm 26/05/21
Sukai Secka, Thames Barrier Park 3:38pm 17/12/20
Jack Burrill, Kennington Park 3:49pm 20/11/21
Zoe Goodall, Oval 4:10pm 20/11/21
Ayaan Younis, Regent’s Canal 5:17pm 24/10/20
Dovydas Vaitulionis, Brannetts Wood 2:23pm 8/04/21
Hajara & Waseem Hussain, Furniture Island 11:15pm 21/06/24
Wahid Hassan, Montgomery Sq 2:34pm 27/09/20
Dise Ockri, Ebor St 3:05pm 9/09/20
Mihrimah Khan, Manor Park 4:20pm 12/02/22
Photographs copyright © Meg Khan
Leo Epstein, Epra Fabrics
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Leo Epstein
When the genial Leo Epstein, proprietor of Epra Fabrics said to me, “I am the last Jewish trader on Brick Lane,” he said it with such a modest balanced tone that I knew he was just stating a fact and not venturing a comment.
“If you’re not a tolerant sort of person you wouldn’t be in Brick Lane,” he added before scooting across the road to ask his neighbour at the Islamic shop to turn down the Friday prayer just a little. “I told him he can have it as loud as he wants after one o’clock when I’ve gone home,” he explained cheerily on his return. “We all get on very well,” he confirmed.”As one of my Bengali neighbours said to me, ‘On Brick Lane, we do business not politics.'”
While his son was in Israel organising Leo’s grandson’s wedding, Leo was running the shop single-handedly, yet he managed – with the ease and grace of over half a century of experience – to maintain the following monologue whilst serving a string of customers, cutting bolts of fabric, answering the endless phone calls and arranging a taxi to collect an order of ten rolls of velvet.
“I started in 1956, when I got married. I used to work for a company of fabric wholesalers and one of our customers on Brick Lane said, “There’s a shop to let on the corner, why don’t you take it?” The rent was £6.50 a week and I used to lie awake at night thinking, “Where am I going to find it?” You could live on £10 a week then. My partner was Rajchman and initially we couldn’t decide which name should come first, combining the first two letters of our names, but then we realised that “Raep” Fabrics was not a good trade name and so we became “Epra” Fabrics.
In no time, we expanded and moved to this place where we are today. In those days, it was the thing to go into, the fabric trade – the City was a closed shop to Jewish people. My father thought that anything to do with rebuilding would be a good trade for me after the war and so I studied Structural Engineering but all the other students were rich children of developers. They drove around in new cars while I was the poor student who could barely afford my bus fare. So I said to my father, “I’m not going to do this.” And the openings were in the shmutter trade, I didn’t ever see myself working in an office. And I’ve always been happy, I like the business. I like the social part.
In just a few years, the first Indians came to the area, it’s always been a changing neighbourhood.The first to come were the Sikhs in their turbans, and each group that came brought their trades with them. The Sikhs were the first to print electronic circuits and they had contacts in the Far East, they brought the first calculators. And then came the Pakistanis, the brought the leather trade with them. And the Bengalis came and they were much poorer than the others. They came on their own, as single men, at first. The head of the family, the father would come to earn the money to send for the rest of the family. And since they didn’t have women with them, they opened up canteens to feed themselves and then it became trendy for City gents to come and eat curry here and that was the origin of the curry restaurants that fill Brick Lane today.
Slowly all the Jewish people moved away and all their businesses closed down. Twenty years ago, Brick Lane was a run down inner city area, people didn’t feel safe – and it still has that image even though it’s a perfectly safe place to be. I’ve always like it here.”
At any time over the last half a century, you could have walked up Fashion St, crossed Brick Lane and entered Epra Fabrics to be greeted by Leo, saying “Good morning! May I help you?’ with respect and civility. After all those years, it was no exaggeration when he said, “Everyone knows me as Leo.” A tall yet slight man, always formally dressed with a kippa, he hovered at the cash desk, standing sentinel with a view through the door and West along Fashion St to the towers of the City.
In his shop you found an unrivalled selection of silks and satins. “This is Brick Lane not Park Lane,” was one of Leo’s favourite sayings, indicating that nothing cost more than a couple of pounds a metre. “We only like to take care of the ladies,” was another, indicating the nature of the stock, which was strong in dress fabrics.
“I lived through the war here, so the attack wasn’t really that big a deal,” he said with a shrug, commenting on the Brick Lane nail bomb of 1999 laid by racist David Copeland, which blew out the front of his shop, “Luckily nobody was seriously hurt because on a Saturday everything is closed round here, it’s a tradition going back to when it was a Jewish area, where everything would close for the Sabbath.”
“Many of the Asian shop owners come in from time to time and say,’Oh good, you’re still here! Why don’t you come and have a meal on us?’ You can’t exist if you don’t get on with everybody else. It was, in a way, a weirdly pleasant time to see how everyone pulled together.” he concluded dryly, revealing how shared experiences brought him solidarity with his neighbours.
Leo Epstein was the last working representative of the time when Brick Lane and Wentworth St was all Jewish and the heart of the schmutter trade, but to me he also exemplified the best of the egalitarian spirit that exists in Brick Lane, defining it as the place where different peoples co-exist peacefully.
Dennis & Christine Reeve, Walnut Farmers
The Romans introduced walnut trees into this country and they have been cultivated here ever since, but you would have to go a long way these days to find anyone farming walnuts. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I travelled to the tiny village of West Row in East Anglia – where walnuts have been grown as long as anyone can remember – to meet Dennis & Christine Reeve, the last walnut farmers in their neck of the woods.
Dennis’ grandfather Frank planted the trees a century ago which were passed into the care of his father Cecil, who supplemented the grove of around thirty, that today are managed by Dennis and his wife Christine – who originates from the next village and married into the walnut dynasty. Dennis has only planted one walnut tree himself, to commemorate the hundredth birthday of his mother Maggie Reeve who subsequently lived to one hundred and five, offering a shining example of the benefits to longevity which may be obtained by eating copious amounts of walnuts.
I was curious to understand the job of a walnut farmer beyond planting the trees and Dennis was candid in his admission that it was a two-months-a-year occupation. “You just wait until they fall off the trees and then go out and pick ’em up,” he confessed to me with a chuckle of alacrity that concealed three generations of experience in cultivating walnuts.
Perhaps no-one alive possesses greater eloquence upon the subject of walnuts than Dennis Reeve? He loves walnuts – as a delicacy, as a source of income and as a phenomenon – and he can tell you which of his thirty trees a walnut came from by its taste alone. He is in thrall to the mystery of this enigmatic species that originates far from these shores. Even after all these years, Dennis cannot explain why some trees give double walnuts when others give none, or why particular trees night be loaded one season and not the next. “There’s one tree that’s smaller than the rest yet always produces a lot of nuts while there’s nothing on the trees around it,” he confessed, his brow furrowed with incomprehension.
Yet these insoluble enigmas make the walnut compelling to Dennis. The possibility of ‘a sharp frost at the wrong time of the year’ is the enemy of the walnut but Dennis has an answer to this. “They say ‘keep your grass long in the orchard and the frost won’t affect them,'” he admitted to me, raising a sly finger to his nose in confidence.
“Walnuts are the last tree to come into leaf in the orchard, in Maytime, and you start to harvest them at the end of the September right through to November. I used to climb into the tree with a bamboo pole about twenty foot long and I thrashed them because walnuts are sold by weight and the longer you leave them the more they dry out. We call it ‘brushing.’ Nowadays, I am a bit long in the tooth to get up into the trees, so I have to wait until the walnuts drop and I walk round every day from the end of September picking them up. They get dirty when they fall on the ground so I put them in my old tin bath and clean them up with water and a broom, and then I put them on a run to dry.”
You would be mistaken if you assumed the life of a walnut farmer was one of rural obscurity, celebrity has intruded into Dennis & Christine’s existence with requests to supply their produce to the great and the good. “One year in the seventies, my father had a call in the summer from a salesman in London saying they needed about eight pounds of walnuts urgently,” Dennis revealed to me, arching his brows to illustrate the seriousness of the request as a matter of national importance.
“‘I don’t care how you get them here, but we’ve got to have them,’ they said. They were for Buckingham Palace, but the walnuts on the tree were still green with the green husk around them. We told them, ‘They’re not ready yet and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ They said, ‘We don’t care, we’ve got to have them.’ Now we kept pigs at the time and there was a muck dump where we put all the waste, so we put the walnuts in the muck dump for them to heat, just like in a cooker. After about two days the husks started to crack, and that’s how we ripened the nuts for the Queen, in our muck dump!'”
Christine recounted a comparable story about how their walnuts went to Westminster. “There was a dinner in the Houses of Parliament to celebrate British produce and our walnuts were served,” she explained to me with a thin smile, “and they sent us the printed menu which listed the provenance of all the ingredients, including ‘walnuts from Norfolk,’ which was a bit of a let down – because we are in Suffolk here.” Yet I did not feel Christine was unduly troubled by this careless error. Both stories served to confirm the delight that she and Dennis share – of living at the centre of their own world secluded from the urban madness, in a house they built on land bought by Dennis’ grandfather and surrounded by their beloved walnut trees.
Too few are aware of the special qualities of English walnuts, especially the distinctive flavour of wet walnuts early in the season when they possess an appealing sharpness that complements cheese well. “Sometimes people want them earlier before they are ripe if they are going to pickle them,” Dennis told me, “if you can stick a match right through from one side to the other, that is the ideal time to pickle walnuts.” Over the years, those who know about walnuts have sought out Dennis & Christine for their produce. “We have a regular customer in Kent who found our nuts in Harrods,” Christine informed me proudly, “she rang us and now we send her our wet walnuts every year. She peels them and eats them with a glass of sherry and that’s the highlight of her Christmas.”
The walnut grove
Dennis & Christine Reeve
Dennis with the tin bath and brush that he uses for washing his walnuts
Dennis with his scoop for walnuts
Dennis outside his father’s cottage
Dennis Reeve, third generation walnut farmer
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
