A review of the Ludlow Food Festival 2011 – Britain’s longest running food festival

A couple of weeks ago my brother Kevin and I decided to head over to Ludlow for the Ludlow Food Festival. Started in 1995, it is Britain’s longest consecutively running food festival and as we hadn’t been before and it coincided with my birthday weekend, we thought it was worth a visit.

We went on the Friday (the opening day). Access to it was easy as we used the recommended park and ride scheme. At 10am on the Friday morning, with a field full of cars and the mention that there were 12 coaches running throughout the day, we could already tell that this was a very popular event! It was a short ~15 minute drive into the centre of Ludlow, then an easy walk from the coach towards the castle which was hosting the food festival.

Walking through Ludlow was interesting – it is a rather unique, small market town. I say unique because despite it being pretty much in the middle of nowhere (not near any big city and a place that I hadn’t heard of before) it has a distinguishing feature in that most of the shops in Ludlow are independently owned. There are some mobile phone shops and coffee shops (e.g. Costa), but you won’t find a Burger King, KFC or McDonalds there, nor will you find a WHSmith newsagents or any high-street fashion/retail shops. Instead you will find a number of independently owned shops, including butchers, cake shops, cafes, chocolate shop, ice-cream shop, fudge shop, craft shops, clothing shops, fishing and shooting shop, museum, etc. Plus it even has not one but two Michelin star restaurants (it is very unusual to have one, let alone two Michelin star restaurants in a small town)!

I live in Milton Keynes which is the UK’s newest town at just 40 years old. Milton Keynes was pretty much build from scratch and therefore had the most recent planning of any town/city in the UK to date. Milton Keynes has everything (including a 16 screen cinema and a 120 metre indoor ski slope), but I found myself walking around thinking that the town planner of Milton Keynes may have gotten things a little bit wrong – there is a lot they could learn from Ludlow.

Just before the castle was a market square. They have a market every week so I don’t know how much of it (if any) was changed for the Food Festival, but it was quite large and nice to walk around. There were a few  food stalls, including a stall with baked goods, run by a Frenchman. Upon seeing the cakes on this stall (rather the size of the cakes on the stall!) Kevin insisted that we sample them – this was to be the theme of the day – i.e. an ‘eyes before belly’ approach to seeing and eating! By the end of the day we would find ourselves rather full!

After walking around the market, we sat outside the castle entrance to eat our cakes (yum!). Then we picked up our wrist-bands (entry passes) and entered the castle through its front entrance. This was all well organised so was quick and easy – it had helped that we had pre-booked the tickets.

The festival was set within the castle grounds – what a nice setting! It was a large event, but easy to walk round. Most of the trade stalls were under-cover in large marquees but there was also plenty to see in the open air.

One of the first things we did was to seek out free samples to nibble on (well that’s half the fun of going to food events isn’t it!). We found stall selling cheese (and more importantly – they were giving free samples). A girl of around 10 years old approached me and offered me a variety of cheeses to choose from. Her mother stood behind her with a big grin on her face, very proud of her daughter who was telling me about each of the cheeses (and she seemed quite knowledgeable) – it was good to see. In addition, the cheeses did taste very good! I remember one of them was so smooth it was almost like butter.

We proceeded to look at (and sample) a number of other stalls before arriving at one of the two presentation areas where chefs would give talks and cooking demonstrations throughout the weekend. Here they talked about cooking eels, which was interesting. They had a video camera and 2 televisions, so you could see what they were doing close-up.

One ‘exhibit’ I found interesting was a hive of bees placed between glass, so you can see the bees at work. There was someone there who told us a bit about bees and pointed out the queen bee to us (they had previously marked it with a dab of blue paint). I put my ear near the glass and could hear the bees buzzing – loudly!

Inside the marquees were stalls from over 130 top quality, small independent food and drink producers – many of them local to Ludlow or the Marches (the England-Wales border country). The main items on sale were cheeses, meats, poultry, game, pies, sausages, sausage rolls, cakes, beers and ciders.

Throughout the day we had more cakes than we should have had, plus some delicious sausage rolls with a cheese and herb flavouring (look how much sausage meat there was in these!):

Blue banana ice-cream (which was very nice and the owner was obviously very proud of his product as he proceeded to tell me how he made this unusual ice-cream):

As well as the food, we were also able to look around the castle. It’s quite small and there isn’t much to see, but it does have a tall tower which offer some fantastic views of the area. Warning, don’t go up the tower if you are afraid of heights – we saw a couple of people freeze half-way up the stairwell!

We spent most of the day wondering between the food festival, the market and the town. By around 4pm most the festival was very quiet, which was nice as there were no crowds of people – if you want to take photographs of stalls and wiz round everywhere quickly, this is the best time of day to do it!

On the Saturday, purely on a recommendation from Camilla from Bart Spices, we visited the Ludlow Food Centre, which is only 5 minutes North of the Ludlow town centre - and it is definitely worth a visit! It is like a mini-supermarket, but full of high-quality produce, ingredients, fish, vegetables, meat, bread, cakes, chocolate, ice-cream, etc. from local suppliers and producers. If I lived near it, I would definitely make it my primary place for food shopping.

Also on the Saturday we went to the town of Ironbridge and then the RAF museum at Cosford (very good if you are into planes).

Then on Sunday we came home because it rained… But we ended up going to the new Jamie’s Italian restaurant in Milton Keynes, which was very nice. What impressed me about it (as much as the food) was the knowledge that the waitresses had about the food. They had obviously been taught about each dish and they offered an explanation of everything while ordering and while serving – this makes a big difference (if you are reading this and you own a restaurant/café/bar – take note!)

So overall, we had a really good, relaxing foodie weekend and I would certainly recommend the Ludlow Food Festival to anyone. They also have the Ludlow Spring Festival in May!

You can find more photos of the Ludlow Food Festival here.