Manor 007 issuu copy

Winter 2015 Issue 7 | ÂŁ3.95

Michael Morpurgo The best story I ever wrote

Sir Tim Smit

After Eden

A caring town Help for the rural homeless

Gift guide Christmas all wrapped up

Festive food Packed hampers

Home fires burning Hearths and Hotpods

MANOR | Winter 2015

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OYSTER PERPETUAL GMT-MASTER II

a r o l e x i s m o r e t h a n j u s t a w atc h. i t’s a n in v e s t m en t. combining timeless elegance with a passion for perfection a nd us e o f the hig he s t-qua lit y m at eri a l s, the va lue o f a role x is a s long-l a sting a s the timepiece itself.

T R U R O

P L Y M O U T H

E X E T E R

T A U N T O N

82 lemon street, truro, cornwall 52 – 54 cornwall street, plymouth, devon 22 cathedral yard, exeter, devon

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watch featured subject to stock availability

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MANOR | Winter 2015

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Polperro, Cornwall

An impressive home with uninterrupted views of Polperro Harbour and out to sea Fowey 7 miles, Bodmin 10 miles, Eden Project 18 miles, Plymouth 25 miles (All distances are approximate) One of the most significant properties in Polperro in a south facing position above the harbour.

An imposing and spacious 5 bedroom, detached family home with an integral 2 bedroomed selfcontained apartment. Beautiful landscaped gardens and terraces running down to the harbour.

Double garage and off street parking. EPC: G. Guide Price ÂŁ1,300,000

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MANOR | Winter 2015

KnightFrank.co.uk/Exeter christopher.bailey@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Exmoor

Magnificent manor house commanding spectacular views

KnightFrank.co.uk/Exeter william.morrison@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Porlock 1 mile, Minehead 5 mile, Taunton 28 miles (London Paddington 1 hour 45 minutes) (Distances and times approximate) Large non-listed manor house of about 13,640 sq ft currently split into 7 holiday let apartments plus owners accommodation. Ideal for conversion into 1 property subject to the necessary consents. Delightful gardens and grounds. Lodge cottage. EPC: E. About 12.87 acres.

Guide Price ÂŁ1,850,000

MANOR | Winter 2015

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MANOR | Winter 2015

Accounts . Wealth . Legal

Contents

Winter 2015

76 32 34 Regulars 15 TOWN MOUSE, COUNTRY MOUSE Correspondence from across the divide

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TRENDS Glamour by day and by night

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Gift guide 24 A LITTLE INSPIRATION A hand-picked selection of gifts for friends, family and loved ones

MANOR CONFIDENTIAL Arbuthnot Latham, The Masked Ball: Halloween, Audi Ladies’ Evening, Trencherman Awards 2016

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AS I SEE IT...

Michael Morpurgo, acclaimed author, poet and playwright

Features 34 FORCE OF NATURE Sir Tim Smit on the success of the Eden Project and his plans for the future

Style & Beauty 16 BEAUTY TUTORIAL

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A CARING TOWN How a Totnes charity is helping the homeless of the area

Glitzy make-up

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MY FEEL-GOOD REGIME Salcombe-based yoga instructor Emma Jaulin

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THE STYLE SHOOT You shall go to the ball

Photostory 44 ELEMENTAL Lee Searle’s powerful seascapes

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60

98 104

68

92

Culture 60 CURIOUS THINGS The New Craftsman Gallery in St Ives presents a cornucopia of curious crafts

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MAKING HER MARK Catherine Cartwright’s poignant images with a powerful message

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SOUTH WEST MUST SEES...

Space 92 DORSET DREAMING Emma Sims Hilditch sensitively transforms the interior of an ancient manor house

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Hotpods – the coolest woodburners

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WORTH MAKING THE TRIP FOR...

Cultural highlights from the metropolis

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WORTH STAYING IN FOR...

Quality time on your sofa

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WORKSPACE Acclaimed sculptor Jilly Sutton

What’s on around the region

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METAL GURU

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SHOPPING FOR SPACE Seasonal style for your home

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Q&A Mark Newbery of Sapphire Spaces

Winter 2015

134 114 118 148

Food 114 A TASTE OF CHRISTMAS Delicious gifts and treats

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CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

MANOR school 137 NEWS IN BRIEF Fund-raising events at Exeter School and Blundell’s; percussion masterclass at Millfield Prep

Shake up your seasonal drinks with ideas and recipes from around the region

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BITES Food news from across the peninsular

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138

Professor Ruth Merttens offers the fourth in her series on how to Help Your Child at Home

THE TABLE PROWLER ...dines out at The Drewe Arms, Devon and The St Kew Inn, Cornwall

Escape 130 ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

Property 145 THE BULLETIN Whats in store for 2016?

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Snowy adventures in Finland

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WINTER WONDERLAND A winter getaway in Cornwall with luxurious lodges – and reindeer

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

PROPERTY OF NOTE Georgian splendour – Middle Traine, Modbury

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SNAPSHOT COMPARATIVE A selection of properties from the South West and London for under £700,000

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inspired by arctic beauty

V I N TAG E S L I M CO L L EC T I O N T i m e l e s s l y b e a u t i f u l a n d l o n g- l a s t i n g , l i ke t h e o v e r w h e l m i n g i c e .

F i n e m e s h s t r a p, s c r a tc h - r e s i s t a n t s a p p h i r e c r y s t a l , s u n r a y d i a l .

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is brought to you by PUBLISHING EDITOR

Imogen Clements imogen@manormagazine.co.uk

COMMISSIONING EDITOR

Jane Fitzgerald jane@manormagazine.co.uk

FEATURE WRITERS

Harriet Mellor, Fiona McGowan ARTS EDITOR

Belinda Dillon belinda@manormagazine.co.uk

FOOD EDITOR

Anna Turns anna@manormagazine.co.uk

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Miranda Gardiner, Alice Humphrys DESIGN

Guy Cracknell ADVERTISING SALES

Rachel Evans, Rae Muscat advertising@manormagazine.co.uk

THE COVER Rose gold metallic gown with open back, Mishi May, POA; Stylist: Mimi Stott; Photographer: Tom Hargreaves; Model: Victoria Coutts

Š MANOR Publishing Ltd, 2015.

MANOR Magazine is published by Manor Publishing Ltd, Registered office: MANOR Publishing Ltd, 52/54 Higher Compton Road, Plymouth, PL3 5JE. Registered in England No. 09264104 info@manormagazine.co.uk. Printed by Warners Midlands plc.

The views of the writers in MANOR Magazine are not necessarily those shared by the publisher. Unsolicited manuscripts, artwork or transparencies are accepted on the understanding that the publishers incur no liability for their storage or return. The contents of MANOR Magazine are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced without permission.

By submitting material to MANOR Magazine, MANOR Magazine Ltd is automatically granted the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, edit, distribute and display such material (in whole or part) and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content. The contributor acknowledges that material submitted may be published in any

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MANOR | Winter 2015

publication or website produced or published by MANOR Publishing Ltd.The contributor agrees not to submit material where they do not own the copyright and where they have not obtained all necessary licenses and/or approvals from the rightful owner. With respect to any photographs submitted, the contributor confirms that all necessary model and property releases have been obtained from any clearly identifiable person appearing in any image, together with any other relevant consents required.

Prices and details of services and products are genuinely believed to be correct at the time of going to press, but may change. Although every effort is made to maintain accuracy we regret we are unable to honour any incorrect prices or other details that may be printed.

Welcome to The Glitz Issue of MANOR! End of one year, beginning of the next. If your 2015 has been anything like ours, it has whizzed past. There is nothing like the perpetual loom of a deadline to speed up time.

And now 2016 is almost upon us, we end this year with a sparkling issue. We have gift pages to inspire, a fairytale Style Shoot to wow and a stunning photostory to remind you that beyond all the wrapping paper, glitz and razzamatazz of Christmas, nature is a reliable constant of awe-inspiring power and beauty.

This issue we are privileged also to feature two of the country’s most impressive and inspiring individuals. Michael Morpurgo is well known for his children’s stories, in particular War Horse.

As well as being an incredibly prolific writer whose stories transport children (and their parents) to different worlds, he, with his wife Clare Morpurgo, founded a charity 40 years ago with the purpose of taking children out of inner-city confines into the countryside. Farms for City Children has children spending a week at a countryside farm, during which they are actively involved in the day-to-day work required. Almost 100,000 children have benefited.

Sir Tim Smit is considered by many to be a Westcountry hero. He is one of those rare visionaries who proposes the seemingly preposterous, then gets on and does it. The Eden Project is effectively the world’s largest greenhouse, built on the site of a disused quarry in Cornwall. From this lifeless pit he and his team created two gigantic conservatories, temperature-controlled to simulate the tropics and warm temperate regions, with the result that where once there was a redundant crater there are now 135,000 thriving plants sourced from all over the world. For a once-bereft community, The Eden Project created hundreds of jobs and has attracted millions of visitors to Cornwall from across the globe. Not content with this incredible feat, Smit plans to create an Eden Project on every continent within four years.

Before you lower your eyebrows, he’s already started.

It seems pertinent at this indulgent time of year to feature those who have nothing, who rely on organizations like food banks and the Totnes Soup Kitchen, which in turn rely on the charity and kindness of volunteers to help provide the service. There’s a complacency amongst many of us that some people’s dire situations are far removed from our own.

More often than not it’s a fine line that divides us, and one that usually results from illness, addiction, misfortune or poor judgement.

Ours is an extraordinary and beautiful planet, full of inspirational people – something to contemplate along with the immense fun that is Christmas. We hope we reflect a fraction of it all in this issue.

Happy Christmas from all of us here at MANOR and see you in the New Year!

Imogen Clements FOUNDER & PUBLISHING EDITOR

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TOWN MOUSE, COUNTRY MOUSE Darling...

Sweetness...

It’s probably my line of work, but I have been contemplating the word ‘deadline’ repeatedly lately. ‘Dead’ seems rather extreme, don’t you think? That said, the yuletide deadline heralding the descent of family and friends is rather daunting. Here in the city, prompts for all that buying, cooking, wrapping, decorating, more buying and generally fortifying oneself for extreme excess abound earlier and earlier. You’d think I’d be fully prepared come mid-November, but alas no.

Taken in, however, by such publicity prompts for perfection, I am intent on pulling off the ultimate Christmas idyll, complete with gold, frankincense and myrrh. I have been studying all that drops through the door and I think that, in true Notting Hill style, I will go all white with the tree this year. White baubles on green look rather lovely, don’t you think? And here in West London, one should never have more than one colour on a tree, except perhaps silver. Silver and white. The arctic fox faux throw I shall arrange leisurely over the chaise nearest to the crackling woodburner. And then a splash of red will radiate from the tall vase in the corner of the room displaying an elegant arrangement of long-stemmed red berries. I, myself, plan to be attired in gold sequins (just the right degree of glint to dazzle) pretty much throughout the festive period, reclining on the chaise pretty much throughout, sipping Oloroso sherry and nibbling Elgin Grocer mince pies, pretty much throughout.

After all that panic, what do you know? Writing to you has got Christmas all wrapped up (ha ha!). All that’s left is to stock up on Touche Eclat and Evian for when the parties commence darling. I can’t wait! Deadlines needn’t be deadlines when you’re as prepared as I am.

Sounds delectable. Here in the country I’d say we probably get an extra whole month over you of a winter blissfully unadorned. We are spared the endless streets of illuminations until much nearer the time – wasn’t it just Regent Street that did it? Now it seems every street in London strings them up straight after Halloween. Anyone would think there wasn’t an energy crisis.

On the open moor instead we get to watch the equally thrilling spectacle of trees and hedgerows turning an autumnal blaze of colour, note a healthy chill in the air and the odd wisp of smoke start to spiral from chimneys. These are indicators that Christmas is around the corner. Well, that and the TV and endless bumph that starts to come through the door. I forget what brands they are but they might as well be emblazoned, “Have you done nothing about it yet?! Look at the state of your place!”

Anyhow, in true wintry mode, I find myself eating more and more. It’s a hibernation thing – pad up now so you have stocks to draw on once the barren winter sets in. As soon as the clocks go back I start to gorge.

All that night-time’s probably got much to do with it. You don’t have night-time, do you, sweetie? Your nights are permanently illuminated. Hence no weight gain. There are some pluses.

I have already made my pudding mix, and stuffed my mince pies. I shall be spending the season not in sequins but an apron, dusty with flour. We are nothing if not domesticated in the countryside, and selfsufficient. I’ve even been offered to cull and pluck my own turkey. That, however, is a step too far. Expect, though, some homemade presents. I am crocheting as we speak. Ho ho ho.

WHAT’S HOT IN THE SMOKE?

WHAT’S COOL IN THE COUNTRY?

Paradise Garage, the latest offering from Robin Gill, chef behind Clapham’s The Dairy and The Manor has opened in Bethnal Green. Phenomenal food, plus Robin’s service is known for its fanfare. Recommended is the rabbit for the table - nose to tail rabbit including a delicious rabbit pie...

Exeter’s Christmas Market on Cathedral Green runs until 19 December. Shopping and eating outdoors overlooked by the city’s magnificent cathedral - a perfect prelude to the big day.

The Sir John Soane Museum on the first Tuesday of each month, does an evening visit by candlelight. Perfect for a pre-Christmas visit but book as it gets busy.

The Greedy Goose, in Plymouth celebrates its two AA Rosettes and Michelin 2016 listing by offering a free glass of Prosecco to all who dine there before the end of the year. Kick off the Christmas office gathering with bubbles.

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beauty

Putting on the glitz It’s party season – the perfect excuse to be a little more daring with cosmetics. Make-up artist Elouise Abbott offers advice on adding just the right amount of glitz and glamour.

PREPARATION

To shine on the circuit, put the preparation in.

MaskerAide pre-party face masks promise to energize, brighten and hydrate your skin. Using active ingredients such as rice extract, honey, orange peel oil and a blend of argan oil, this mask ensures the perfect base for your make-up application.

In winter months, skin can appear dull and tired. A touch of Touche Eclat and an illuminating primer are perfect for smoothing and brightening the skin in preparation for flawless foundation.

Current favourite is Tom Ford’s Illuminating Primer, which leaves skin dewy, youthful, and radiant. You shall go to the ball.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Nothing says glamour quite like false eyelashes.

Giving both volume and length, they instantly frame the eyes. Ardell Invisiband Lashes: Wispies lend just the right amount of drama. These eyelashes give a natural finish, and are lightweight and comfortable to wear, making them good for both beginners and the eyelash-faithful alike.

If false eyelashes are not for you, then lashings of Diorshow Extase will give plumped and shaped lashes and has a formula that leaves lashes conditioned as well as lush. False lashes in a tube.

Perfect your smoky eye – it’s the perfect party

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accessory. This season I’m loving the Chanel Entrelacs Eyeshadow Pallette, which contains five shades of neutral browns with a wonderfully smooth, pearly finish.

SHIMMER

Now reach for the sparkle. Metallics are very much on trend this season. Add a touch of metal to your eyes with Illamasqua’s Vintage Metallix in Galaxy Antique Gold, a highly pigmented cream eyeshadow. Go the whole hog and add a touch over red lipstick or along the cheekbone for extra shimmer. A true metallic multi-tasker.

‘Strobing’ is the latest trend in contouring. Simply sweep a light touch of highlighter down the bridge of the nose and along the cheekbones to instantly sculpt and create definition. This technique is beautiful and soft, giving an ethereal dewy finish. I recommend NARS Highlighting Blush in Albatross. But use sparingly – a little goes a long way.

NAIL IT

Finish off your party look with a sweep of nail lacquer. The OPI Starlight Holiday Collection contain four mini shades that encapsulate Winter 2015, from deep luscious reds to creamy champagne.

Layer a lighter shimmer over a darker colour for a chic twist.

trends

Glamour by day...

Faux fur and a midi heel ankle boot are all you need to dial up the glamour on daywear. Fortunately this season there is no shortage of gilets, jackets and neckwear in an array of autumn colours to oblige, along with an abundance of well-cut stylish boots.

Helen Moore Next AW15

pom poms, House of Fraser, £24 each

Jacket, Next, £75 Scarf, Hobbs, £59

Buckle collar, Helen Moore, £60

Boots, Zara, £79.99 Boots, Dune, £129

Denim jeans, Marks and Spencer, £29.50

Treacle giant muff, Helen Moore, £158

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trends

...and night

Necklace, Jaegar, £75

Lace, dark Victoriana, faux fur and shimmering brocade were AW 2015 catwalk staples and all translate perfectly into evening wear with the addition of some killer costume jewellery. Combine key looks to dial up the glamour and add a thigh-high suede boot or strappy stiletto for maximum impact.

Pascal Millet AW15

Pendant, Cornwall Gold, £70

Necklace, Marks and Spencer, £25

Earrings, Marks and Spencer, £15

Dress, Marks and Spencer, £69 Shoes, Whistles, £185

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Shoes, Whistles, £175

Dress, Next, £85

trends Hobbs

Bracelet, Zara, £19.99

Necklace, Jaegar, £75

Tassled top, Whistles, £110

Organza dress, Whistles, £195

Dress, Zara, £29.99

Dress, Whistles, £250

Boots, Dune, £169

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Whether you are looking for the perfect Christmas gifts or a festive treat for yourself, Drakes is here to help.

F

or over 60 years, Drakes has been helping customers find the perfect gifts for Christmas.

This time last year, it opened the doors of its newly branded and newly located flagship store on the Upper Floor of Drake Circus Shopping Centre, Plymouth.

The store boasts a sleek 82ft glass frontage with a contemporary interior to complement it. The grand central entrance gives way to two distinctive sides of the store: a branded boutique and a diamond and bridal lounge. The branded boutique is home to some of the world’s most well-known jewellery and watch brands including Swarovski, Thomas Sabo, Links of London, Michael Kors, Emporio Armani, Citizen and many more.

In contrast to this, the diamond and bridal lounge offers an array of diamonds and gemstone collections including Annamaria Cammilli, Chimento, Drakes Diamond Designs, Desire, Your Style and many more. With Drakes’s vast collection of sparkling products, you’ll be sure to find something beautiful to treasure this Christmas.

Drakes offers some festive tips on finding the perfect jewellery gifts for Christmas…

Swarovski, Duo Set Star, £79

Your Style, 18ct White Gold 0.75ct Diamond Ring, £2,695

drakesjewellers.co.uk

Your Style, 18ct White Gold 0.35ct Diamond Earrings, £875

With Drakes’s vast collection of sparkling products, you’ll be sure to find something beautiful to treasure this Christmas.

Pop into Drakes at Drake Circus Shopping Centre, Plymouth

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promotional feature

THINK ABOUT THEIR STYLE

Take notice of the jewellery they already have. Simple details like what colour gold they wear or what styles are their favourite can help you find the perfect gift to complement their style and their personality.

Henry London, Highgate Collection Watch, £125

JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

Looking for something extra special? Ask our team to show you our limited-edition Christmas products.

This is your chance to find a gift that is truly unique.

WHAT TO GET THE GIRL WHO HAS EVERYTHING…

Wondering what to buy the girl who has everything?

How about the matching earrings/pendant or ring?

Our team are on hand to help you find the matching items for the jewellery they already have from us.

After all, who doesn’t love to match!

BESTSELLERS

Looking for a gift for the fashion conscious? Ask our team for their recommendations on what is popular at the moment to help you find a present that will be right on trend.

PERFECT TIMING

Christmas shopping will have you feeling festive!

Make sure you allow yourself plenty of time to find exactly what you are looking for.

WORK WITHIN YOUR BUDGET

Daniel Wellington, Classy Winchester Rose Gold Watch, £99

Christmas can be an expensive time of year so set yourself a budget to work from. There are so many beautiful jewellery and watch collections at Drakes to suit all budgets and tastes; you’ll be spoilt for choice.

DON’T FORGET THE GIFT WRAP!

A beautiful gift deserves beautiful packaging. Let us wrap your purchases all ready for Christmas with our compliments.

DRAKES REWARDS

Don’t forget to use the Drakes Rewards you have collected throughout the year towards your Christmas gifts or t treat yourself to something sparkly for those all-important Christmas parties. Not started collecting your Drakes Rewards yet? Pick up your complimentary card in store and start earning Drakes Rewards every time you shop with us.

BE INSPIRED

Pick up your free copy of our CHRISTMAS Brochure (right) in store today and let us inspire you with a taste of the collections we have in store. Can’t find what you are looking for? Pop in store and our team will be delighted to assist you.

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My feel-good regime Emma Jaulin is a yoga instructor who teaches yoga flow, strala yoga, surf yoga and SUP yoga on the ocean. She lives in Salcombe with her husband, Hendrick, a pilot.

My passion for yoga grew when I was trying to make my own body feel less sore after being out surfing, skiing, wake skating and generally being active. My teachings are related to board sports – looking closely at the breath, alignment, strengthening, opening and increased flexibility, reducing the potential for injury. I love exploring the ways my body moves and how I can play with different shapes.

I am definitely an outdoor keep-fit kind of girl.

I really don’t enjoy the gym... so I don’t go. Fitness for me has to be fun. I’ll do anything to stay active – helping out in the garden, maybe some skipping, lots of walking the cliffs of Devon and surfing.

I don’t stick to any one style of yoga, I just move how my body feels good moving. Some days I have a very strong practice, hot and sweaty, other days I may just lie on my mat. If I wake up not in the best of moods, I often don’t feel like getting on my mat, but when I do it makes me feel so much better.

I walk every day with my mum and Truffles, our family dog. Our usual route is from Salcombe through Rew, up onto the cliff and back to Sharpitor and Overbecks, and back via South Sands. Yesterday we walked from Salcombe to Hope Cove, stopping for a lovely lunch at The Cove, and then headed home. We also take the ferry from Salcombe to East Portlemouth and walk to Gara Rock

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People assume I’m vegetarian because of my job, but I’m not. I eat a lot of fish. I don’t eat much red meat, only when my body is craving it, perhaps once a month. I eat a lot of vegetables – carrots are my favourite. I will try to eat the healthiest version of what I fancy.

To relax I just chill out at home reading a book, or go walking. I don’t drink so I don’t tend to go out to pubs or clubs, and I am not a big shopper. I might walk to North or South Sands and sit by the sea for a little while.

I also love to bake and experiment in the kitchen.

For a break we go to France, to Ile d’Oléron, which is where my husband Hendrick is from. We both love to surf and it’s perfect for some nice mellow waves and good food. We also love Barbados for a sunny surf as it’s a quick, easy flight.

Sunset surf sessions are my favourite and the best wave is a long open-face wave, about 2-3ft with no one else out there (which in Bantham, my local spot in the UK, never happens). Kit-wise, I wear a wetsuit all year round, with boots, gloves and hood for the winter. I surf a 9ft FireWire.

Before heading out into the water I always do a few yoga Sun Salutations, and after I take a hot shower followed by a gentle stretch, some twists and hip and shoulder openers.

The walk from Salcombe to Hope Cove

With paddle boarding and SUP yoga, the water never feels the same underneath the board. My inflatable Starboard is fantastic for teaching and personal practice – stable, very resilient and you can deflate them and take wherever you like. Plus it’s a good warm-up when you have to pump the board up.

I have a sweet tooth and I love chocolate. For a real treat I buy the Lindt Lindor red balls. I am also really lucky to have possibly the best ice cream made right on my doorstep, at Salcombe Dairy – their honeycomb is amazing.

LANGUISHING IN MY WASHBAG I swear by Nivea’s Rich Body Moisturiser and also love REN Neroli and Grapefruit Body Cream. I also use Eucerin Even Brighter Day and Night Cream for hyper pigmentation, as I am out in the sun all year round. With my hair in the salt water and sun so much, and scrunched up in a bun, it gets out of condition, so I use Aussie 3 Minute Miracle to help smooth out the ends.

beautiful fused glass interior pieces, handmade at our cornwall studio. bespoke design service available. galleries at st ives, padstow, fowey and launceston, cornwall and ripley, surrey. www.jodowns.com

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Christmas is mere days away and if you’re anything like us you won’t have even compiled lists, never mind started your Christmas shopping. So to help stave off the panic we’ve come up with some thoughts… just a few, as pretty much every magazine out there will have come up with their own. So, jot it down, get on and order so that you can enjoy those last few days before Christmas instead of trooping the streets in a sweat…

Timepieces

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Cluse Watch in Burgundy £89 Lorna Ruby lornarubyclothing.com

Patek Philippe Ladies Moon Phase in yellow gold £22,450 Michael Spiers michaelspiers.co.uk

Patek Philippe Men’s Calatrava in white gold £14,170 Michael Spiers michaelspiers.co.uk

Asus Zen Watch £199.95 John Lewis johnlewis.com

Garmin Vivoactive GPS Smartwatch £199.99 John Lewis johnlewis.com

Silver open face pocket watch hallmarked and dated Birmingham 1923 £595 Mortimers mortimersjewellers.co.uk

MANOR | Winter 2015

gift guide For children

Gingham reindeer £29 The Little White Company thewhitecompany.com

Ohana soprano ukulele £165 Maker Maker makermaker.co.uk

Roller zebra £99 Newmakers newmakers.com

Illuminated globe £40 John Lewis johnlewis.com

Disney jewellery box £15 Marks and Spencer marksandspencer.com

Rex dinosaur £25 The Little White Company thewhitecompany.com

Toy shop £200 Canvas and Willow canvasandwillow.co.uk

Toy shop bean bag £45 Canvas and Willow canvasandwillow.co.uk

London toy bus £50 The Little White Company thewhitecompany.com

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For him, for her, for anyone...

Slate mustache wine stopper £8.99 Iroka iroka.com

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A Cook’s Book Signed by Stella West Harling £20 including UK mainland postage Special offer for MANOR readers quote MANORMAG ashburtoncookeryschool.co.uk

Fizz Champagne flutes £29.99 Iroka iroka.com

Pineapple ice bucket £25 John Lewis johnlewis.com

Garbo cocktail glasses £35 for set of two Waitrose Kitchen waitrosekitchen.com

Noughts and crosses drinking game £12.50 Iroka iroka.com

Fish dipper pots £13.95 Leaf Street leafstreet.org.uk

The Folly Acres Cook Book

by Sue Webster with poem by P J Harvey £75 Other Criteria othercriteria.com

Fresh bottle with fruit piston £8.50 Iroka iroka.com

MANOR | Winter 2015

gift guide For him, for her, for anyone...

Alpaca bed socks £15 per pair John Arbon jarbon.com

Jacquard spot cashmere scarf £139 The White Company thewhitecompany.com

Rêverie (detail) Carine Bouvard 30 x 90 cms, oil on canvas £850 Artworld artworldltd.com

Bud drop earrings in gold plate £78 Mirri Damer mirridamer.com

Bobble hat £39 The White Company thewhitecompany.com

Jollie Socks in a Tin £15 Maker Maker makermaker.co.uk

Soap set £8 Leela leela-uk.com

Reversible heart bracelet £49 The White Company thewhitecompany.com

Handmade leather belt £395 The Belt Makers thebeltmakers.com

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Arbuthnot Latham and Reiss On 29 October private bankers Arbuthnot Latham hosted an exclusive women’s event in association with Reiss at their Exeter office in The Senate, Southernhay. Champagne from Pebblebed and canapés from Astridges Catering were served throughout the evening and guests heard and took tips from Reiss representatives on how to dress ‘from desk to dinner’ while browsing their ‘Modern Spin on Classic Femininity’ collection and other beauty and accessories stalls. A raffle was held in Wellbeing of Women, dedicated to improving the health of mothers and babies. Photos by Alex Lawrence.

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confidential

The Masked Ball: Halloween Returning to West Cornwall’s Flambards Theme Park, the cult dance music event Masked Ball put on their biggest Halloween Ball yet. Inspired by ’80s brat pack vampire romp The Lost Boys, the Masked Ball’s creative team transformed the family-friendly tourist attraction into an immersive film set of “funk, fun, freakshows and frights”. Thousands attended the party and had gone to almost as much effort with their outfits as the event organisers had with their customisation of the site. Next year Masked Ball celebrate their tenth anniversary on the weekend of 20-22 May. See maskedball.net for further information.

PHOTO: RACHEL KEVERN

PHOTO: CHARLIE RAVEN

PHOTO: JONATHAN VIVAAS-KISE

PHOTO: RACHEL KEVERN

PHOTO: MATTHEW SMITH

PHOTO: JONATHAN VIVAAS-KISE PHOTO: MATTHEW SMITH

PHOTO: RACHEL KEVERN

PHOTO: MATTHEW SMITH

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Audi Ladies’ Evening More than 200 women descended on Audi Exeter for an evening of magic, diamonds, floral demonstrations, fashion and fun. Guests were welcomed with wine and canapés from Posh Nosh and broadcaster Judi Spiers acted as compère for the evening. The event was held as a pre-launch for the new Audi R8 Coupé and 20 local concessionaries set up stands promoting everything from health and beauty to cake decoration and interior design. Entertainment was provided by close-up magician Dan Brazier and each company kindly donated prizes for the charity raffle, which helped to raise over £1,300 for Macmillan Cancer Support. Photos by Glen King.

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confidential

Trencherman’s Awards 2016 Readers of The Trencherman’s Guide have voted in their thousands for their favourite fine dining restaurants, gourmet hotels and foodie pubs in the South West, and on 9 November, at The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, the winners were announced. It’s the second year of the awards and winners this year included The Swan at Bampton, The Cornish Arms in Tavistock and Soar Mill Cove near Salcombe. The winners of 2015 each cooked a course at the black tie six-course dinner. The 2015/16 Trencherman’s Guide contains write ups on 154 restaurants from across Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset, Bristol, Bath, Devon and Cornwall and includes an introduction by Michael Caines MBE. trenchermans-guide.com. Photos by Guy Harrop.

Chefs behind the six-course dinner

John Hooker, The Cornish Arms, Tavistock

Paul and Donna Berry, The Swan, Bampton

Keith and Becky Makepeace, Soar Mill Cove, Salcombe

ALL I WANT FOR

Christmas...

Free Parking | Cornish Pantry Restaurant Beautiful Grounds | Local Heritage

TOLGUS MILL, NR REDRUTH, CORNWALL, TR16 4HN TEL: 01209 203 280 | cornwall-gold.com

Mention Manor magazine for one complimentary jewellery clean in our workshop throughout December

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PHOTO:RICHARD CANNON

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As I see it...

Michael Morpurgo OBE, is an author, poet and playwright best known for his children’s novels, especially War Horse. He was British Children’s Laureate from 2003-2005.

I joined the army because of an uncle, and became a teacher because of another uncle. They were both my heroes. Uncle

Peter was 20 when WWII broke out, and he died when his plane crashed in Cornwall, aged 21. He was a RADA actor and he was acting around the country, and the war came and killed him. My Uncle Frances was a pacifist and a teacher.

When war broke out, he said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ But when his brother was killed, he joined up and ended up being a secret agent in France and became this extraordinary hero.

Then after the war, he went back to teaching.

about the age of eight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child cry, but I’ve seen hundreds of their elders cry. I think children feel it just the same. They also feel the fact that mum or dad or grandpa’s in tears, and they’ve never seen grandpa in tears before. Adults understand the significance of war, about the cruelty and pity of it, and many older people have memories of having lived through it. And the older you get, of course, the more you understand your own mortality. It’s not that children don’t grasp it – they respond to the story differently.

Teaching reminded me of who I had been when I was very young. I liked that, because there’s something rather fresh

I like to speak of Farms for City Children as the best story I ever wrote – it has been going for 40 years and we’ve had

and open-hearted about young people. They’re not closed off by the difficulties of life and I responded to that. I also instinctively wanted to pass on to them what I knew was interesting, what I liked. And I did like stories and I did like poems, so I started reading to them.

When I chose stories that I really liked myself and read these to children, there was this wonderful silence. They

lost themselves in the story completely, and I thought, ‘This is the most magical thing – that human beings could communicate like this through someone else’s story.’ I ran out of good stories to read, so I started making up my own.

That is the root to my story-telling. I really wanted to hold children’s attention. To have them rapt in a story…

You don’t need to talk down to children. I could just look

them in the eye and tell them the story I wanted to tell because I knew that they were as deep or as troubled or as interested and as sensitive as I was. There is an honesty, strangely enough, about telling fiction.

Children should have an enriched life. I realised that when

they are very young, things should happen to them to enable them to find the potential in themselves. In other words, education should never be narrowing, and it shouldn’t be formulaic. It should be creative – the more your experiences of life when you are young, the more chance you may have of making the best of yourself. In a way, that is what led to my wife and I starting Farms for City Children.

The education system is moving rapidly in the wrong direction in this country. It’s all about testing and

punishment, and the punishment is failure. If you teach for a test, and if the children you teach fail it, you create two things: you create failure with them and you’ve made a failure of the method that you used.

Children learn empathy through seeing what upsets other people and it’s important to understand that. Empathy

is what literature is all about. Children don’t respond in the same emotional way as adults. When I go to the play of War Horse in London, I sit there with 1,000 or so people – parents and grandparents and children down to

about 90,000 children spend a week on one of the three farms. Only I didn’t write it myself. This is a story that my wife Clare and I put together, when we were these rather idealistic and naive people from the 60s, who decided that children needed more than a classroom. We wanted to do something for children that is so arresting and so enriching that it becomes part of who they are. So we bought a large Victorian house in the middle of Devon, with a real farm, and brought kids down from Bermondsey in London, from St Pauls in Bristol, wherever – inner city areas – to experience something that they’d never experienced before that they didn’t think was part of their world.

It’s important to give children the opportunity to work, and it’s very important for them to feel that their work is valued. The farm gives them the challenge of it being

difficult, sometimes unpleasant even – cold, hot and smelly. But also an understanding that something is more important than what THEY feel about it – which is the animals and looking after the animals. That comes first: ‘you’re the farmer’ – children are brilliant at role-playing and they understood that.

It’s wonderful to be lying in your bed at 8 o’clock in the morning and hear the trailer trundling along the lane with 12 children and the farmer, all going to feed the calves.

Then I hear their voices in the fields when they’re walking back – it goes on. We did it for 25 years, hands-on.

Milking the cows and feeding the pigs and feeding the calves with the children – that’s what you have to do when you run a charity, because you can’t afford to pay anyone, so you do it yourself. We did that for 10 years and another 15 years in a slightly different guise, but still going out every day, and I was writing my books in between. The satisfaction that’s come from that has been immense.

The Farms for City Children On Angel Wings.

A magical retelling of the Christmas story by Michael Morpurgo.

Performed by Michael and actress Nandi Bhebhe on Tuesday 8 December, 7pm at St John’s Smith Square, London, SW1P 3HA. Accompanied by Voices at the Door singing Christmas carols and directed by Simon Reade. farmsforcitychildren.org/on-angel-wings-2

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A passionate environmentalist with the drive of a risk-embracing entrepreneur, Sir Tim Smit intends to build an Eden Project on every continent by 2020.

Fiona McGowan thinks he might just do it.

T

wo hundred and fifty years ago, a Plymouth apothecary called William Cookworthy determined to copy the millennia-old Chinese method of creating fine white porcelain (kaolin) from clay.

He found a huge area of decomposed granite clay in an area of South East Cornwall, and by 1768 set up a business extracting ‘china clay’ from the earth. By the 19th century, the area north of St Austell was exporting 65,000 tonnes of china clay a year, and by the start of the 20th century, half of the world’s china clay was being produced there. Working conditions were harsh and the scars on the land became deeper and more devastating to the natural environment.

By the end of the 90s, the mining company moved its business to Brazil where labour was cheaper.

Jobs were lost, and poverty came quickly to the region. The land was left barren and cratered, with huge conical piles of extracted earth decorating the landscape like giant buboes.

In 1995, one man had a vision. He imagined building a spectacular theatre in which to showcase human dependence on plants in one of the craters left by the mining industry. Within two years, he had pulled together the people and the money to make his dream real, and in 2001 the attraction opened to the public. The world’s largest geodesic biomes form two temperature-controlled conservatories representing the ‘humid tropics’ and a ‘warm temperate’ region.

There are 135,000 plants sourced from all over the world and dozens of staff. Hundreds of people worked to build and create it – from digger operators

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PHOTO: APEX/THE EDEN PROJECT

Eden is estimated to have brought in more than £1.1bn to the local area in its first ten years – making it one of the most successful publicly funded attractions in the UK.

PHOTO: THE EDEN PROJECT

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PHOTO: THE EDEN PROJECT

The Bell Tower in Eden’s Mediterranean Biome

and specially trained ‘roped-access’ builders, who precariously stretched giant pieces of plastic across the frames of the biomes, to horticulturists, performers and artists. It is nothing short of miraculous that this happened with a starting budget of £3,000.

Tim Smit, the man behind the Eden Project, was awarded a CBE and made a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) and has been given countless honorary degrees and awards for his commitment and service to the community.

He is a man of almost as many facets as the giant geodesic domes of his brainchild. A mix of “very upper class English” and “blue-collar Dutch”, Smit was educated at a private boarding school and coowns a private school with his sister, yet is highly critical of England’s education system. He studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Durham, yet is nothing short of scathing about higher education.

His pronouncements about “middle-class fads”, such as the love of all things organic, the prevalence of gardening shows and the “Chelsea and Hampton Court” shows, seem in stark contrast to the universal and lasting popularity of his earlier brainchild, The Lost Gardens of Heligan, as well as the Eden Project, both of which surely tap into the very ‘middle-class’ enthusiasm that he decries.

Most people are aware of the contradictions in our society, and the class structure that is so riven with ancient social chasms. I wanted to know if Tim had seen a shift in a way of thinking – perhaps a more general leaning towards concern for the environment

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and absorbing norms of eco sense into everyday life.

I wasn’t going to get a straight answer, but I did get a lot of fascinating philosophising. This is a man with a mission. It may not be a clear and direct one, but the ultimate goal is to build an educational Edenstyle attraction on every continent on the planet by the time he’s 65. He’s now 61. This may seem like a Quixotic dream to those who don’t know the man.

But having met him and learned a little about his dynamic and unpredictable risk-taking attitude to achieving his goals, it’s not so crazy.

When drawn to discuss his roots, he baulks. “The trouble is, most men try to write their history backwards as if it made sense. Mine makes no sense.” He describes a childhood spent playing outside in the walled garden of the family estate in Cheshire, discovering frogs and ladybirds, testing himself with perilous leaps from swings, and working out the physics of hitting a tin can with stones from different angles. “As children,” he says, “we all thought like Eddie Izzard, didn’t we? You know – ‘I wonder what those moles are doing right now?

Eating Special K cereal of course!’”

What Tim and Eddie Izzard seem to have in common is that they are still very much in touch with their internal child. Their streams of consciousness are at once brilliant and surreal. Smit’s was obviously a childhood of play and imagination, although it’s anyone’s guess whether that was inhibited or encouraged at boarding school. Smit studied Archaeology and Anthropology at university “because I liked detective work. I liked the idea of finding things in the sands of Araby and all that.”

But it turned out to be nothing like his romanticised ideal: “It was prehistoric and it was muddy – freezing bloody days in Northumberland with a Gale Force 8 coming in from the East.”

There’s a fine line between humour and fury when Tim talks about his past – the anecdotes are well placed and probably oft-told (he is regularly asked to speak at events, and his book, Eden, is partly an epic tale of his erratic life path), but there is always a sort of pent-up crossness. Just as he claims to “loathe” the education system, he also “loathes” the music industry (he went from Durham into a rock band and thence became a successful producer in the “seedy” world of the 80s pop music industry), and yet the very pop music that he describes as “dull, confection, sugar candy” now fills the Eden Project stadium to packed audiences every summer during the hugely successful Eden Sessions.

Looking at Tim’s apparently eclectic journey to founding the Eden Project, it is easy to see several constants. One is personal, passionate energy.

Whether he’s ranting about the music industry, talking about the bereavement of areas that have lost their industrial output (“there is a collective grief in Cornwall”), or discussing the future of horticulture

feature and education in this country, the intensity of his engagement is awe-inspiring.

The other is an unshakeable passion for the environment which manifests in encouraging a sensible and realistic social engagement with protecting it. During a serendipitously rainy holiday to Cornwall, Tim and his then-wife bought a dilapidated farmhouse whose walls were stapled with fertiliser bags to keep out the damp from an encroaching pond. They sold their house in London within 48 hours (“It was the 80s, you could do that then”) and spent the next two years renovating the farmhouse. Oh, and then there was the pot-bellied Vietnamese pig called Horace who liked to “warm his arse on the Rayburn” – whom he mated with a female called Doris – which then led (naturally) to Tim and his wife setting up a rare-breed farm. Like all entrepreneurs, Tim is a tremendous risk-taker, and revels in the stories of taking on improbable projects, then running out of money and having to make things work by sheer force of character and hard work. His charm has clearly enabled him to infect others with his enthusiasm: the derelict estate inherited by his friend John Nelson was hacked away by the two of them and various volunteers until it eventually became re-created as the working garden now called The Lost Gardens of Heligan.

The genesis of Eden is well documented – it was the combination of Tim Smit’s drive, utter self-belief

and the engagement of influential and passionate individuals that enabled the disused clay pit in one of the poorest areas of the UK to be transformed into the now-iconic visitor attraction. It has drawn more than 15 million people to the attraction itself, and it’s estimated to have brought in more than £1.1bn to the local area in its first ten years – making it one of the most successful publicly funded attractions in the UK. By 2012, however, visitor numbers were falling – a combination of bad weather, drop-off in numbers visiting Cornwall and the country-wide recession meant that drastic measures had to be taken. In 2013, there was a major round of redundancies, and a change in management structure, which led to Tim stepping down from his Chief Executive role and moving into a new subsidiary: Eden Regeneration – focused on seeding new projects.

There could be little better for Tim’s tirelessly creative mind than to be running such a business – you get the impression that he works best when envisioning gigantic projects from a shoestring budget: the resourcefulness required puts his charisma and motivational forcefulness into over-drive. After two years spent courting the Chinese, Tim and the Eden Regeneration team have signed a deal to build a huge structure with the same educational and environmental intent as the Eden Project, outside the city of Qingdao in China. It is a huge undertaking.

The city is located in Eastern China and has nearly Artist’s impression of the proposed Eden Westwood Project for in Devon

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feature

If we could teach Mandarin to every youngster from age three to 18, I would do that.

Because the Chinese could be our greatest friends, and the technologies that we have a competency in here are things that our friends in China will want.

PHOTO: MATT JESSOP/THE EDEN PROJECT

9 million inhabitants. The area around it draws in more than 63 million visitors annually – mainly for the expansive beaches and the horticultural shows at gigantic purpose-built venues. The Eden Regeneration concept, then, fits extremely well – even more so because, as Tim says, “Like every site we look at, it is poisoned. It is poisoned by salt and nitrates – they used to do salt panning and prawn breeding there.” The site sits at the confluence of rivers and is surrounded by marshland. One of the principle aims of the project is to restore the marsh to its former beauty. A new city is being built nearby, which will house around 300,000 people. As Tim gives a rudimentary outline of the plans, the scale is breathtaking. It is hard to imagine the engineering feat that will incorporate a ‘cloud forest’ and enclosed weather systems like thunder and lightning. Unlike the Eden Project in Cornwall, the focus will mainly be on “the underground and the water worlds”.

The western media often portrays China in a negative light. We hear about its appalling recent environmental history and the constraints put upon those who speak out against the government.

However, Tim has a very different view. “I think China is just so exciting. It’s just going to explode in a good way,” he enthuses. “The Chinese say: ‘We’ve developed rapidly, which has damaged our environment. But we had to make that push to take our people out of poverty, to get to a critical mass where as an economy we could be in charge of our fate. Now it’s up to us to put a similar push into the environment.’ And they really believe it. People of this generation talk to me all the time about it. And really senior people. It is the big obsession.”

In a characteristic leap of logic, he goes on

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to say that the West Country should be building bridges with the Chinese. “If we could teach Mandarin to every youngster from age three to 18, I would do that. Because the Chinese could be our greatest friends, and the technologies that we have a competency in here are things that our friends in China will want. And in so doing, we could create an expertise in the West Country. We’ve already got mining and land remediation expertise in various companies here, as well as in the Camborne School of Mines. Exeter University has a lot of interest in that, as well as a huge amount of interest in public health and environmental health, which is going to be the biggest single issue in China.”

Running concurrently is another plan to build an attraction near Tiverton Parkway aimed a “celebrating the best of Devon”. If the local council approves it, Eden Westwood will have at its heart an educational structure called The Ark, with a focus on a sustainable future, showcasing locally produced food and drink. Plans extend to creating an artificial surf lagoon, an exhibition centre, designer retail outlet, an agricultural education and innovation centre, and a farm shop with local produce and freshly made food.

It is thrilling to bear witness to this kind of thinking – both lateral and aspirational – and just as thrilling to think that there are people like Tim Smit who are capable of pushing these concepts forwards and actually succeeding. Where others might sit around the dinner table coming up with theories for how things could change, he gets out there and begins to engineer it all. An Eden Project in every continent by 2020? Watch this space. edenproject.com

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Totnes has a famously alternative approach to life that extends to the way it treats its own rough sleepers, writes Harriet Mellor. Photos by Beccy Strong.

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hotographer and filmmaker Beccy Strong moved to Totnes after 15 years producing television and charity documentaries around the globe. In 2012, she, like many of the town’s residents, was deeply touched by the death of Michael Gething, a 42-year-old rough sleeper who succumbed to hypothermia after bedding down in an alleyway on a sub-zero winter’s night.

He was the fourth homeless person to die in Totnes over two years. Beccy was amongst the hundreds of residents following the cardboard coffin in a funeral procession that made national news.

“I heard about Michael on the day of the funeral when his body was carried up the high street,” says Beccy. “I went to find out if there was a soup kitchen, which led to my meeting Mark Hatch at the Drop-In and I wondered what I could do to to help.”

It turned out that the gap Beccy could fill was to increase awareness through social media. She raised money through crowd-funding to produce a website, a film and series of photographs.

Beccy Strong (fourth from left) and Drop-In founder Mark Hatch (in apron) pose with clients

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“I got to know the homeless people, and hear the stories that brought them to the place where they’re at.

We’ve stayed in touch and some have become friends.”

It’s a homeless problem that could be viewed as typically Totnes. This patch of South Devon’s famously alternative approach to life extends to the way in which it treats its own rough sleepers. Under the banner ‘A Caring Town with a Compassionate Response’, Totnes offers a network of community support and a more understanding calibre of resident, meaning the roof-less population have little desire to move on. It’s hardly a surprise, in comparison to sleeping on the streets around the rest of the UK, where receiving abuse from disparaging passers-by is the norm. Being kicked in the head or having one’s sleeping bag set on fire are, sadly, all too common tales.

Pastor Mark Hatch is warm, calm and softly spoken – the voice you’d want to hear if you were scrabbling around in the hellhole that is ‘rock bottom’. “Even the homeless people want to live in Totnes because it’s a safer and caring town,” he says. “The problem is that a large percentage of the homeless want to stay here rather than live in Plymouth or Torbay. This creates a difficulty as there’s no available social housing here, and even if there were sympathetic landlords willing to let private rentals, the benefits would never cover the shortfall.”

Mark has been running the Drop-In since 1995. I visit on a Friday morning and meet some of the clients who are having a few hours’ respite from the elements. Each weekday, and for lunch on Sundays, they can grab a window of self respect and a non-judgemental attitude, along with a cooked brunch and hot showers. Clothes are bundled into the washing machine and new ones doled out, with support workers visiting from local relevant agencies.

At 12.30 it’s closing time, at which point they hit the streets again.

“I’ve talked a lot of people in desperate situations out of suicide in my time,” says Mark. “A lot of the time I counsel people to encourage them it’s worth carrying on: ‘We can give you a hand up, you don’t need to stay down here’. Building friendship is the best way to gain trust and look at issues to try and reach the inner person and say ‘look, we can signpost and help you get back on track’.”

Now winter is upon us, the charitable hospitality extends to opening up as a Night Shelter in adverse

Each weekday, and for lunch on Sundays, they can grab a window of self respect and a non-judgemental attitude, along with a cooked brunch and hot showers.

Services at the Drop-In are provided by local volunteers

Nick and Mark

Dinner at the Drop-In

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In the villages, dotted between million-pound-plus houses and holiday homes, rural poverty can feel just as acute and isolating.

Martin and Mandy in 2013

Mandy in 2013

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Karma

weather conditions, where a maximum of eight bodies can squeeze in on rolled out mattresses, but apart from space, Mark quietly admits the lack of funds brings some obvious restrictions. “We do need money to pay the bills, there’s always water and in winter our running costs increase to heat the place.

During the past two years we’ve had to turn the heaters off at night because we can’t afford to keep them on.”

Also under the CTT (Caring Town Totnes) umbrella, many others are volunteering tirelessly: the Emergency Food Parcel Scheme at Market Place Ministries gives to those in immediate crisis; CAP (Christians Against Poverty) opens the Totnes Free Church for another daily drop-in; Street Pastors and both rural and town church donations are coordinated into action by Liz Waterson, Reader of the Totnes Ministry, and recipients and referrals come via the Totnes Children’s Centre and the Leatside (GP) Surgery. The actual food provided comes from individual donations and bulk loads collected from local food businesses like Riverford Farm by Food in Community, another link in the support chain.

Mark explains that their combined forces mean pooled resources: “Totnes is a collaboration of people volunteering their own specialist skills. We’ve all got round the table and looked at every area in the community in need, and that includes the elderly.”

If the rough sleepers are a more visible presence, the area has another hidden swathe of those in need.

In the villages, dotted between million-pound-plus houses and holiday homes, rural poverty can feel just as acute and isolating.

For a household already living stringently within their means, sudden job loss, benefit change or delays, or perhaps a family breakdown, can mean putting

food on the table, filling a car tank with petrol or taking a bus ride become very real concerns. With these obstacles in mind, the Food Bank volunteers come directly to the people.

This part of the Caring Town network is headed

by Carol Leigh who, despite working full-time, started a voluntary outreach support scheme in 2008 that has since turned into the Totnes Food Bank, which covers the whole of Devon’s wealthy South Hams area (excluding Dartmouth and Kingsbridge, which have their own operations).

“Referral comes through local agencies who believe the household is in need,” says Carol. “We work oneto-one with individuals on a case-by-case approach, dropping off the food, having a chat and offering support. We are very aware of the shame attached and the need to keep anonymity in such tiny communities.

Some are so deeply embarrassed, but in need, that their neighbours even collect it on their behalf.

“Our outreach work was started by a group of people who’d experienced a downturn and this kind of poverty themselves. They’ve got back on their feet and this is them giving back. It’s a horrible place to be and it is a situation that can happen to anyone.” thedropin.org.uk

HOW YOU CAN HELP CARING TOWN TOTNES The Giving Back scheme is a way of discreetly giving money via participating cafés in the community rather than directly to those begging. Seeds 2, The Brioche, The Green Cafe and Kerala are all participating cafés. 100% of donations directly support the homeless and those in need. freedomcentretotnes.com Totnes Food Bank desperately needs: finance and produce (legally, food must be in date and disposing of it costs money), cleaning products and toiletries, warehouse space to store food and chilling facilities – fridges, fridge-freezers and chiller boxes. foodbankcommunity.weebly.com Fraser Nute at the Totnes Free Church collects donations to make up Christmas food hampers to distribute to the service users. Email admin@totneunitedfree.org.uk

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While we get on with Christmas and matters festive indoors, nature carries on performing its magic outside. Lee Searle has captured the elements at their most intense at various locations around the South West. It’s sobering to think that at a time when we’re all focused on the material, the earth around us remains a permanent source of wonder.

All Searle’s prints are available to buy at leesearle.com/shop.

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Sunset Sennen Cove

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Storm waves hit Sennen

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St Michael’s Mount in the mist

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February storm batters Penzance

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Lightning strikes St Michael’s Mount

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St Ives at Christmas

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Sunset at Godrevy

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LEE SEARLE Lee Searle began photographing at the age of 18 where his passion for photography was inspired by a family member passing down an old camera for him to use for fun.

He soon became a professional photographer, shooting landscapes around Cornwall. Searle decided to go freelance when his photographs were getting more and more popular, and since then has built a highly successful commercial career working for Sainsbury’s, the BBC and the National Trust among others.

He has travelled the globe with his photography, but remains firmly rooted in Penzance, Cornwall, where he was born and raised.

As well as landscape and commercial photography, Searle is in high demand for his documentary approach to weddings, and thoroughly enjoys the commission, “I consider it a privilege. I want my pictures to tell the true story of the wedding day. No fuss, just my clients, their families and their emotions.” leesearle.com All images are available to purchase at leesearle.com/shop

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Porsche recommends

and

If history is any indication, you’re looking at the future of sports cars.

The new 911.

Ever ahead.

For more information call 01392 822800 or visit our Centre.

Porsche Centre Exeter Matford Park Road Exeter EX2 8FD info@porscheexeter.co.uk www.porscheexeter.co.uk

Official fuel economy figures for the 911 Carrera 4S Coupé in mpg (l/100km): urban 22.8 – 27.4 (12.4 – 10.3), extra urban 41.5 – 42.8 (6.8 – 6.6), combined 31.7 – 35.8 (8.9 – 7.9). CO2 emissions: 204 – 180 g/km. The mpg and CO2 figures quoted are sourced from official EU-regulated tests, are provided for comparability purposes and may not reflect your actual driving experience.

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Culture

New Craftsman Gallery, St Ives | Catherine Cartwright South West must sees | Worth making the trip for | Worth staying in for

PHOTO: © THE ESTATE OF SIR TERRY FROST

Terry Frost’s Autumn Rings Andeuze, September 1971 Until 9 January at Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn, and The Exchange, Penzance. newlynartgallery.co.uk

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For anyone with a passion for the fantastical, New Craftsman Gallery St Ives presents a show of craft curiosities for the Christmas season.

Words by Mercedes Smith.

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PHOTO: PHILIP VOLKERS

Barbara Keal, Stag

culture

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timeless relationship between humans and all living things. By way of lengthy hand-making processes, the Keals let the beauty of their raw materials speak of their natural origins, and each of their unique works retains the vitality of the living plants and animals from which they come. The curious transition of these natural things into objects of domestic life – dramatic felt headdresses to be worn or displayed, and twisting, naturally surfaced wood pieces to be used as furniture – only seems to enhance the strange story of their making and remind us of our place within the endless process of growth, decay and renewal.

‘Curious Things’ will be on show from 5 December to 8 January at New Craftsman Gallery, 24 Fore St, St Ives, Cornwall. newcraftsmanstives.com

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

inter, and especially Christmas time, brings with it ancient traditions and tantalising tales of wonder, conjuring up in the childish depths of our imagination a landscape of wild woods, magical toys and mythical creatures made real. Throughout December, New Craftsman Gallery sets this scene with an exhibition of extraordinary contemporary craft by felt-worker Barbara Keal, woodworker Richard Keal and rising automata artist Jack Stiling.

Stiling is a recent graduate of Falmouth University’s Contemporary Crafts degree, and ‘Curious Things’ marks his first-ever exhibition at what is one of the UK’s leading craft venues.

Automata is a re-emerging art form, the roots of which stretch back to Victoriana and all the way to Greek mythology. As well as being fascinating to anyone with an eye for the unusual, it is an area with particular appeal for collectors.

Inspired by classic literature, hand-me-down stories and campfire fables, Stiling’s fantastical objects draw the viewer into a world of marvellous mechanisms, magic and illusion, where curiosity is king and all things are possible. Based partly upon the old English counting game ‘Tinker, Tailor’, each piece in this series of new works embodies an aspect of its creator’s thoughts, feelings and moods, and includes peculiar personages such as ‘Band Boy’, a hand-built, animated puppet, ‘The Craftsman’, a character comprised of assorted findings ranging from a shoe tree to a helicopter engine, and the astonishing ‘Cannonball Run’, complete with what the artist describes as “a medium-defying transmaterial cannonball and explosive onomatopoeic surprise”.

Creative couple Richard and Barbara Keal live and work alongside each other at their East Sussex studio, using wood, wool, feathers, grasses and other natural materials to make objects that affirm the

Jack Stiling,The Craftsman

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Making her mark Catherine Cartwright’s subtle prints of birds – suspended, held and contained – emerged from her work with women who have experienced domestic violence. Belinda Dillon talks to her about the accessibility of printmaking, art activism and notions of freedom.

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he term ‘art activism’ might be relatively new and specific, but art and social action have long been entwined, and many artists not only seek to produce work that is transformative – enabling the viewer to see the world anew – but which is also a catalyst for change. Printmaking particularly has a long association with social activism, and for Catherine Cartwright, an Exeter-based artist using print, drawing and film to explore concepts of freedom, refuge and the associated socio-political agendas impacting women, it is at the heart of her practice. An endlessly versatile medium, printmaking is intrinsic to Catherine’s participatory work, which has been focused recently on creating opportunities for women who’ve experienced domestic violence to find safe spaces in which to express themselves through art-making.

“Printmaking is not only versatile artistically, it is also hugely accessible,” says Catherine. “That is always my primary concern – I worked in gallery and museum outreach before concentrating on making my own work – and print offers so many ways of making an impression, whether through making rubbings (known as frottage), or carving into a rubber and printing that, to monoprinting and drypoint – all of these can be quickly learnt by someone new to printmaking. In terms of materials for printmaking, you can use pretty much anything, and for me as an artist it promises a long life of learning in-depth skills.”

Interested in how artists can effectively contribute to positive social change, Catherine’s work spans the local and the global. In Exeter, she is a director of the Double Elephant Print Workshop, which engages in teaching and outreach workshops, including running sessions with dementia patients at Franklin Hospital.

She is also the UK coordinator for the printmaking project ‘Absence & Presence’, part of ‘Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here’, an international artist collective set up by San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil in response to the 2007 bombing of the booksellers’ quarter in Baghdad – initially 130 artists produced letterpress broadsides, but the numbers involved have since swelled to more than 500 artists from 20 countries; originals prints produced for ‘Absence & Presence’ will be exhibited internationally during 2016, including at Exeter’s Central Library and The Brook Gallery.

Politically, Catherine has always been interested in notions of freedom, and is a long-term member of Amnesty International, but it was the 65th anniversary in 2013 of the Declaration of Human Rights that inspired her to examine more closely what it means in the modern context. “I really started to look at the reality of human rights and issues of liberty around the world. We have this declaration, which is like a creed for 21st-century living, but as soon as you scratch the surface it explodes.”

Blue Tit Held

Held Still Opposite: Sparrow

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Honing that idea down to focus on issues around personal freedoms, most recently Catherine has been working on projects with women affected by domestic abuse and sexual violence. In late 2013, she undertook a five-month residency at a women and children’s refuge in Exeter. During her last weeks there it was announced that after 30 years the refuge would close due to funding cuts. Working with filmmaker Josh Gaunt, Catherine produced The Last Resident, a profoundly moving film that was picked up by Radio 4, The Guardian and BBC Breakfast to illustrate how cuts are directly affecting vulnerable women and children.

Subsequently, over ten weeks in 2015, Catherine initiated a project called Art House, working with another group of women to explore concepts of personal refuge. As much about creating a peersupportive, compassionate and friendly environment as it was about making art, the project was led by artist Nicci Wonnacott and Josh Gaunt, and resulted in a printed document, The Refuge Manifesto, but also a short animated film of the same name.

“The film was less about a bricks-and-mortar refuge, although we’d like one of those in Exeter, and more about creating a safe space,” says Catherine.

“This film has the women’s actual voices or representations through the artwork and animation they’ve made. I’m keen that people who work in our public services can watch the film and hear those voices, in the hope that it will inform or influence decision-making around these issues. We live in a democracy but I don’t feel that there’s a great ease of involvement in those processes.”

Catherine’s latest exhibition, ‘16 Days of Action’, is named after – and coincides with – a global UN initiative taking place between two key dates: 25 November, which is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls, and 10 December, which is International Human

Rights Day. Across Exeter and Devon, various events and workshops will take place to raise awareness around domestic and sexual violence, including Reclaim the Night and the 40th anniversary of Stop Abuse for Everyone.

Catherine’s exhibition, at Exeter’s Brook Gallery, features a series of prints that look at the theme of coercive control – domestic violence that is hidden, or not obviously visible, but which is insidious and subtle in its expression.

“Coercive control manifests in patterns of abusive behaviour – physical and non-physical – in intimate relationships, whether that’s wife and husband, same sex couples, or it might even be son and mother.

It’s difficult to define, but this year that aspect of psychological control became a criminal offence, although it has not yet entered into force, and there’s much discussion now about how it can be measured and evidenced, given that it’s about patterns rather than incidents. Our legal system is based on recording instances of violence which result in stuff you can see, but actually the majority of female homicides occur when there has been no violence leading up to it.

“I was interested to see how I could make work that enables people to look at a difficult situation in a way that doesn’t make them shy away altogether – when images are hard to look at or very emotive, then it’s often easier to not look.”

Working with preserved specimens of dead birds – a sparrowhawk, song thrush, tawny owl, blue tit, wren and sparrow borrowed from Nigel Pinhorn, who runs Devon Nature Walks, and uses dead birds for teaching purposes – Catherine set up still life scenarios to explore ways of holding, suspending and containing. Simple and subtle, in muted tones and with blurred edges, the prints convey the difficulties intrinsic to identifying coercive control: a sparrow looks in repose, but only gradually does the hand holding it become apparent, as if emerging from the

I try to make work that enables people to look at a difficult situation in a way that doesn’t make them shy away altogether.

Catherine in her studio

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Song Thrush and Sparrow, Net

I’m keen that people who work in our public services can watch the film and hear those voices, in the hope that it will inform or influence decision-making around these issues.

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culture background; a blue tit sits inside a grip that could be providing protection or restricting movement of any kind; fingers could be stroking or squeezing.

“I wanted to see how you could hold onto something in different ways that might look like the one being held is not really being held at all. In some ways, the work has a dispassionate air, one of pure observation, so I used a lot of dry point, which is a printmaking process that can be rather tight and controlled.”

Alongside Catherine’s work there will also be four large prints by Portuguese artist Paula Rego from her series on female genital mutilation. In contrast to Catherine’s quiet pieces, these works are startlingly graphic, highlighting how images can get straight to the heart of a topic in a way that language can’t, or is often deliberately used to soften the horror – FGM campaigners have long been arguing against the use of the term ‘female circumcision’ to describe female genital mutilation. “Calling it ‘circumcision’ somehow makes it ok,” says Catherine, “a ritual that equates it with male circumcision, whereas FGM is about control. It belies its true nature.”

Night Bride, Paula Rego

For Brook Gallery owner Angela Yarwood, it’s a chance to showcase some politically charged work.

“It’s interesting to see Catherine’s very gentle work alongside the Regos. We’ve never had this series before, so this exhibition has given me a reason to show work of hers that is more provocative than I would usually choose. And that these pieces are for sale is an amazing opportunity – you would usually only get to see this work in a public environment.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to flag up an important issue, which is one of the reasons I’m interested in supporting it.”

As a long-time admirer of Rego’s work, Catherine is particularly excited to be showing in the same room. “The very first time I went to a gallery, aged 14, was on a school trip to Tate Britain, and the only painting I remember was one of Rego’s called The Dance. That’s when I started loving art, because of all the stories you could tell. I admire her courage, and the ambiguity in her work, which is like life – you can’t see anything clearly really – but through that she has a clarity of vision. The way that she orchestrates the narratives through the scenes that she sets up reminds me of Goya – incredibly powerful images that resonate so strongly.”

Strong images that resonate, and which allow for the telling of people’s stories – that sense of ‘making your mark’ – is what imbues printmaking with such relevance, politically. For the women with whom Catherine has been working, particularly – many of whom have been controlled, displaced and abused, and denied personal autonomy – ‘mark-making’ is an important step on the journey to recovery.

“Generally art gives us a richness, a space, and if we enable environments where people can make some work, or enjoy the materials and the immediacy of it, then that can be hugely beneficial. I think art can offer ways forward, and I’m interested to see how and where it does. With a project like ‘Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here’, for instance, there is a question about whether it makes any difference to people living in Iraq and it’s not unusual for artists involved to raise this question, but what it is doing is bearing witness to the continuing tragedy for the people of Iraq and showing solidarity with them. Sometimes we’ll get a message on the Facebook page from someone living in Baghdad, saying how happy they are to see this project happening, and feel that they’re being heard.

“Being listened to is really important. I think that art and creative practice are an amazing medium to communicate about what’s that’s going on in the world. That’s why it exists.”

‘16 Days of Action’ is at Brook Gallery, Exeter, 25 November – 10 December, brookgallery.co.uk. You can watch The Refuge Manifesto film at catherinecartwright.co.uk

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Model shown is XE S in Italian Racing Red (with optional 20” propeller alloy wheels with space saver wheel, advanced parking assist pack, panoramic sunroof and lighting pack priced at £48,835).

DESIGNED TO ENTICE In celebration of Aston Martin’s long-standing association with James Bond, and to mark the release of the new film Spectre, 150 DB9 GTs have been placed on special reserve for the creation of individual DB9 GT Bond Edition models. Each Limited Edition comes equipped with an exclusive specification, featuring unique 007 badging and bespoke Bond themed accessories.

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They are for comparability purposes only and may not reflect your real driving experience, which may vary depending on factors including road conditions, weather, vehicle load, and driving style. Vehicle shown for illustrational purposes only.

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South West must sees...

Whip it up Back for a third year, Bristol’s Wardrobe Ensemble once again bring a thoroughly unique Christmas show to the Bike Shed Theatre. Set in the bombed ruins of an Exeter restaurant in 1944, Eloise and the Magic Whisk is the story of a daring young girl who unwittingly unleashes an ancient curse, and must head to the underworld to find a cure. If the previous festive shows are anything to go by, you can expect great original music, inventive theatricality and lots of laughs. A much richer dish than the tedious slap-my-thigh fodder that usually passes for Christmas entertainment.

8 December – 9 January at Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter. £12/£8 (£5 previews 8-14 December). Age 7+.

See bikeshedtheatre.co.uk for show times.

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PHOTO: © THE ESTATE OF SIR TERRY FROST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2015

Green Below, 2003

A touch of Frost Commemorating the centenary of his birth, a new exhibition across two Cornish galleries celebrates the career of leading modern British painter Sir Terry Frost, bringing together paintings, collages and sculptural forms from public and private collections across the UK. Looking at Frost’s work through ideas of performance, construction and colour, the exhibition takes a fresh perspective on his practice over six decades, and will also feature a re-commissioned series of strikingly contemporary three-dimensional works: a range of ‘soft sculptures’ through which the artist sought to bring out colour in all its intensity without hard structure or flat surface – like a brushstroke in space.

Until 9 January at Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn, and The Exchange, Penzance. newlynartgallery.co.uk

Gone to pot Inspired by the North Devon landscape and his early career as a marine biologist, potter Roger Cockram creates ceramics that conjure something deeply elemental.

Celebrating his work and career, ‘Forty Years a Potter’ will feature his classic stoneware as well as more recent work made using the difficult medium of hand-thrown porcelain clay. As well as the larger one-off pieces – which regularly sell through Bonhams for impressive amounts – Roger also produces a range of high-fired domestic/kitchenware that offers a great way to start collecting work by this important local potter.

Until 9 January at White Moose Gallery, Barnstaple. whitemoose.co.uk Group of Porcelain Pots by Roger Cockram

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Home and abroad

Fred Yates, In the Park, Penzance, oil on canvas 50 x 75 cm

More than 40 oil paintings and watercolours of Cornwall and France will be on display during ‘Penzance to Provence’, the first solo exhibition of respected primitive painter Fred Yates’s work in West Cornwall for many years.

2 December – 6 January at Cornwall Contemporary, Penzance. cornwallcontemporary.com

Experimental space

PHOTO: © GERHARD RICHTER

Since the 1960s, visual artist Gerhard Richter has been exploring the limits and possibilities offered by paint as a medium, often using photography as a starting point. ‘Artist Rooms’ is a touring exhibition of selected works that stretch the very notion of what constitutes ‘a painting’, examining the breadth and depth of Richter’s practice and techniques by focusing on three broad areas of activity: figurative, constructive and abstract.

Until 16 January at Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery.

Free admission. Visit plymouth.gov.uk to check opening times over Christmas.

Self Portrait Standing, Three Times, 1991

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Access all areas Stand-up comedy, activism, investigative journalism… Mark Thomas’s shows are hard to define, but what they all have in common is his unflinching gaze at the important details that others might want to keep hidden. This latest piece, Trespass, carries on from 100 Acts of Minor Dissent, and looks at the constant negotiations required for the public to access what is ostensibly ‘public’ space, particularly in urban areas. How do we turn the skyscrapers and corporate squares into our playgrounds?

11 December at Calstock Arts, Cornwall. £16/£14 or £15/£13 in advance. 16+. calstockarts.org

Get set for solstice

PHOTO: PETER CARTER

The Montol Festival is a six-day arts and community festival celebrating the midwinter solstice and Cornish traditions, culminating in the main event, Montol Eve, on 21 December. Throughout the week there are lantern and mask-making workshops, strolling bands, carol services, storytelling, Mummers Plays, a ceilidh and late-night shopping in Penzance. During the main event the people of Penzance take part in Cornish traditional customs of Midwinter and Christmas, including Guise dancing, when many people wear traditional masks, dress in disguise and wear mock formal costume. Several fire beacons are lit throughout the town, and the first return procession is followed by a Montol Party in St John’s Hall.

16-21 December in Penzance. For full details of the events leading up to Montol Eve see montol.info

David Jamin “Le salon vert”

Thomas Bossard “I’m sure he cheats”

Oil on canvas 73x60cms

Oil on canvas 73x60cms

62 Church Street, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 3DS 01326 219323 | 07913 848515 | info@artworldltd.com | www.artworldltd.com

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Worth making the trip for...

PHOTO: © BRISTOL CULTURE

The final countdown The one event at which we are all guaranteed a front-row seat is the one about which we speak the least. ‘death: the human experience’ draws together hundreds of diverse objects – from a Ghanaian fantasy coffin to a Victorian mourning dress – to reveal stories from cultures across the world, from the earliest human societies to the modern day, and encourages you to consider ethical issues, different attitudes to death and how different cultures have dealt with the end of life. As a society we are reluctant to talk about death and dying; this exhibition is about helping to start that conversation.

Until 13 March at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. bristolmuseums.org.uk

All the rage After wowing audiences at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, multi-award-winning young company Barrel Organ take Some People Talk About Violence on tour.

Looking at how violence and its repercussions seep into every facet of our lives, the show is as much about how the company works – the audience helps to choose the cast for each performance – as it is about the subject matter. Compelling stuff.

1-12 December at Camden People’s Theatre. £12/£10. cptheatre.co.uk

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Let’s all go down the Strand...

This winter, Somerset House is packed to its glorious neo-classical rafters with all manner of art, entertainment and activities.

Until 13 December in the River Rooms. Free admission.

It’s staggering to note that in 2009, we produced the same quantity of data as in the entire history of humanity up to that point. Featuring specially commissioned and rarely seen pieces from a variety of international new media artists, including Ryoji Ikeda, James Bridle and Eva and Franco Mattes, ‘Big Bang Data’ is the UK’s first major exhibition exploring the information explosion that is radically transforming society, culture and politics in the 21st century. The works follow the origins of data, reveal its industrial infrastructure, visualise hotly discussed data sets, from migration patterns and artificial intelligence to the global population of cats and trends in selfies, and consider the advantages and dangers of data in our modern-day society.

PHOTO: NORTH NEWS & PICTURES LTD

‘One and All’ is a digital voyage through sight, sound and sea by three leading artists: Martyn Ware’s soundscape takes inspiration from his childhood ‘charabanc outings’ to the Yorkshire coast and memories recorded by the public; combining sound and art, Tania Kovats’s 12-kilo bronze bell, cast on Porthcurno Beach in Cornwall, will ring daily at high tide over the River Thames; while Owen Sheers’s collaboration with film-maker Ben Wigley will take visitors on a lyrical audio-visual journey around the Gower Peninsula. Honouring 50 years of the National Trust’s Neptune Campaign, which has helped to fund the acquisition and care of 775 miles of coastline, the artworks can be experienced online at nationaltrust.org.uk/oneandall ; or you can attend a dramatic staging overlooking the Thames.

What Does the Sea Say by Martyn Ware

Owen Mundy’s I Know Where Your Cat Lives, Hackney, 2015

3 December - 28 February in the Embankment Galleries, South Wing. £12.50/£9.50.

PHOTO: JAMES BRYANT

And after all that, what better way to calm your art-stimulated brain than with a leisurely skate around the beautiful temporary rink (right) that’s become one of the capital’s favourite festive activities. Skate at Somerset House with Fortnum & Mason includes club nights, dining packages, the pop-up Christmas Arcade, and a kids’ Skate School. Christmas doesn’t get better than this.

Until 10 January 2016. Skating tickets from £7.50.

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The pain of truth If all the saccharine TV commercials and feel-good pre-Christmas preparations are too much for your inner cynic, then let Frankie Boyle bring you crashing down to earth with Hurt Like You’ve Never Been Loved, his first live show since 2012. It’s doubtful that the break has softened him...

5 December at Colston Hall, Bristol. ÂŁ21.50. Over 16s only. colstonhall.org

Outside the box Once again, the London International Mime Festival brings some of the most exciting and boundary-busting UK and international practitioners to the capital for 29 days of physical and visual performance work. Featuring cuttingedge circus-theatre, animation and puppetry, mask and object theatre, the programme takes place across various venues, including Shaw Theatre, Barbican, Soho Theatre, Southbank Centre, and, for the first time, Tate Modern. There might even be a lycraclad man trapped in a box, just for old time’s sake‌ 9 January – 6 February at various locations.

See mimelondon.com for full programme.

Traditional High Tea for two ÂŁ25 Prosecco High Tea for two ÂŁ35

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culture Worth staying in for...

As an antidote to the mountain of chocolate truffles and super-sweet Christmas telly you’ll have been forcefed, here’s something a little darker for your palate over the festive season…

Gothic twist From the spectacularly nihilistic pen of Julia Davis – whose previous nightmare characters have included Jill the psychopathic beautician in 2004’s brilliant NightyNight – Hunderby is a period-sitcom homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, complete with a horror-show of a housekeeper (played by Davis), a mansion filled with secrets and a heroine with a dark past.

Series 2 of Hunderby premieres on Sky Atlantic in December.

Box of frights

Know your Onions

Broadcast in the dying hours of Christmas Eve, the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series was a fixture of the seasonal schedules throughout the 1970s and spawned a long tradition of chilling tales that terrified yuletide viewers for decades to come.

This expansive box set collects over 13 hours’ worth of content, including all 12 episodes of the classic A Ghost Story for Christmas series, the entire Classic Ghost Stories series (presented by Robert Powell), the M R James episodes of Spine Chillers (presented by Michael Bryant), and three of the Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee instalments from 2000. Also included is a 48-page booklet with essays and full credits.

Often overlooked when it comes to classic ghost stories, Oliver Onions (18731961) was a master of the creepy tale, and this collection is the perfect accompaniment to a roaring fire, a gale outside and large brandy. Among its many pearls of horror, The Dead of Night includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, a splendidly spine-tingling read about a writer trying to unblock his creativity by isolating himself in an empty house – never a good idea. A perfect stocking-filler.

£48.99 from bbcshop.com

The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions is published by Wordsworth Editions, available at Waterstones for £2.99. waterstones.com

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You shall go to the ball For this style shoot we descended on Poltimore House, east of Exeter.

This once stately home is now in wrack and ruin, but like all buildings still retains traces and an aura of faded glory from times gone by. Given the special time of year we thought we’d dress up in true regal fashion and breathe a little bit of elegant glamour back into its weary, crumbling walls.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM HARGREAVES STYLED BY MIMI STOTT

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Nude silk corset and petal pink tulle skirt, Mishi May, POA

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Blood red taffeta and lace ballgown, Mishi May, POA

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Black duchesse corseted ballgown, Mishi May, POA

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Blood red silk chiffon fish tail gown, Mishi May, POA

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Rose gold metallic gown with open back, Mishi May, POA

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Location: Poltimore House, Devon Photographer: Tom Hargreaves Model: Victoria Coutts Stylist: Mimi Stott.

Hair and make-up: Philippa Spring All gowns from mishimay.com

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a natural night’s sleep At Naturalmat, in the heart of Devon, we hand make mattresses and beds using natural and organic materials.

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Mattresses made by hand in Devon

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hand crafted frames Carpenter Oak create beautiful, award winning timber framed spaces.

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space

Space

Emma Sims Hilditch sensitively transforms an ancient Dorset house Hotpods – the coolest woodburners | Jilly Sutton’s workspace Shopping for Space | Designer’s Q&A

johnlewis.com

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Transforming an 11th-century Grade II listed manor house into a contemporary family home was all about rethinking the space for award-winning interior designer Emma Sims Hilditch.

P

erched high above the local village and set amongst rolling lawns and with a one-acre lake, this Dorset manor house enjoys an outlook almost as spectacular as its history. Dating back to the time of William the Conqueror, who gifted the manor to one of his favourite noblemen, the building literally has its heritage etched into the very stone, with names and dates carved into window frames and other unlikely places.

When the manor house was purchased, the new owners decided the time had come to transform it from its manorial past into a light-filled, contemporary home. They were keen to strike the right balance between preserving the patina of the past while bringing the interior up to date, and turned to Cotswold-based interior designer Emma Sims Hilditch.

Emma is known for breathing new life into listed buildings. Her practice, Sims Hilditch, is based in Wiltshire but she works on projects throughout the UK as well as for international clients. Although not confined to rural buildings, she enjoys working on countryside homes that resonate with the country lifestyle she loves. Many of these have been heritage properties, and Sims Hilditch has developed a reputation for introducing contemporary lifestyle elements in a manner that is sympathetic to their history.

“Listed buildings should be more than just time capsules for period features,” states Emma.

“They should be lived in and enjoyed in a way that

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makes sense for contemporary needs but without jeopardising the building’s rich character.”

For Sims Hilditch, the first stage is to strip back as much as possible in order to get a sense of the bones of a property. “It’s important to peel away the layers of previous decoration to discover the building’s raw materiality.”

In the case of the Dorset manor house, she discovered a historical jigsaw puzzle: Norman and Georgian architecture pieced together with beautiful wooden beams, original stone walls, ancient flagstone floors, large fireplaces and detailed wooden panelling.

“This is where I drew my inspiration from before looking at how to design the interior in a way that made sense for my client’s lifestyle and the space,” recalls Emma.

Prior to developing the aesthetic, Sims Hilditch focuses on the client’s needs, building up a picture of how a room will be used. “We start every project with a walk through the property with the client, listening to their needs, wants and vision – they are the ones who will live in the house, after all! It is a collaborative process; we bring our experience and are quickly able to say if something won’t work, or to suggest alternatives. I love it when we’re able to suggest layout reconfigurations that delight a client. Often, this is a new way of seeing the house that makes a huge impact on being able to better enjoy the space.

“We approach every project with an open mind. That said, it is often the kitchen and living area that require a bit of rethinking, especially

space

Listed buildings should be more than just time capsules for period features. They should be lived in and enjoyed in a way that makes sense for contemporary needs but without jeopardising the building’s rich character.

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when dealing with older properties, as the layouts positioned kitchens in far-flung corners of the house.

Nowadays the kitchen is such an integral part of the home – more and more people want the kitchen and living area to be integrated so that they can enjoy entertaining friends and family. This was especially the case on Dorset Manor.”

After the walk through, the client is sent a written document outlining Sims Hilditch’s understanding of the brief and design concept suggestions based on the clients’ lifestyle. “We then begin the process of creating by drawing accurate floorplans. It’s technical but there’s no point placing furniture until we’ve got the layout and ergonomics of the space sorted out – especially if we are suggesting radical transformations.

The floorplans form the foundation for everything we do – all interior joinery, lighting (which is key to making a home exquisite) and the general arrangement of furniture. After that we begin to visualise it and bring the design to life so that our client can picture how it will look – we use a combination of sketches, mood boards and sample boards to present furniture, fittings and equipment. Most people love this stage as it is where you start to get a feel for how the finished project is going to look.”

With Dorset Manor, Sims Hilditch’s key task was to re-evaluate the existing configuration of the rooms, especially on the ground floor. The clients didn’t want a formal dining room but hankered after a large kitchen and open living area.

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“By doing away with the formal dining room, we were able to relocate the drawing room into this stunning Georgian wing of the house. We then reconfigured the old drawing room into a large openplan kitchen-dining room, which gave us further scope to create a beautifully functional laundry and bootroom in what had been the old kitchen.

“The kitchen was an especially satisfying area to design as it initially presented a number of challenges in terms of introducing fitted furniture to crooked walls and uneven floors. Our solution was to design bespoke cabinets that perfectly fit the space.”

Sims Hilditch also reconfigured the rooms on the first and second floors to create a beautiful master bedroom and en suite bathroom that make the most of the open beams. The ceiling height is accentuated by the clever use of wallpaper to create an airy yet intimate feeling.

The owners were thrilled with the transformation: “With the old layout, visitors would find themselves lost in the warren of rooms, but the new layout makes perfect sense. Every room now has its purpose and there are no odd little spaces that we never use.”

The overall result is classic yet contemporary; an understated, calming aesthetic that Emma cultivates both in her work and personal life. “To me, good design doesn’t have to crave ostentation. True luxury is about quality of life, embracing the beauty of everyday living and allowing inspiration to flow from our surroundings.”

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I love it when we’re able to suggest layout reconfigurations that delight a client. Often, this is a new way of seeing the house that makes a huge impact on being able to better enjoy the space.

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Emma Sims Hilditch is an award-winning interior designer and founder of Sims Hilditch, a multidisciplinary practice specialising in interior architecture, interior design and furniture design.

Background “My career started in film production for Ridley Scott.

Not conventional, I know, but I learnt a lot about managing large-scale projects, which has stood me in incredibly good stead for the kind of interior projects I do now. When I married, I left London and moved to Wiltshire, where I did a course to learn how to sew curtains. I learnt so much about fabric, which of course can be applied to other items like upholstery and soft furnishings. From there, it was quite a natural process because I would make curtains for people and inevitably they would then ask my opinion on other design decisions.

Word spread and people began asking me to design entire rooms. My ‘big break’ came when I was recommended to do the interior for a manor house.”

Inspiration “I have an exploratory approach to design – I’m always looking at my surroundings for inspiration, be it a beautiful countryside walk or a smart design hotel.

Travelling in Europe and the USA provides huge inspiration. Hotels are designed to help their clients live the dream and be surrounded by beauty and harmony.

In particular, I love the Belgian influence, which tends to be understated, elegant and natural in its approach. Axel Vervoordt is a master of design.”

Style “Our look is always about creating an oasis of calm. In the House and Garden Top 100, we are listed as offering ‘a breezy 21st-century take on English design’, which I think is a good description of what we do. We’ll happily work on any property where the client wants that look. I tend to avoid lots of bling and anything that shouts ‘look at me’!” simshilditch.com

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PHOTO: CHRIS YACOUBIAN

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From its beginnings in a surf bus called Gregory, Hotpod is now one of the wood-burning stoves of choice. Fiona McGowan meets its creator – a man with flaming good ideas.

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ike the R2D2 of robots, Dan Harding’s highly characteristic Hotpod stoves stand out in a marketplace of uniform rectangular designs.

Visiting his earthen-floored workshop – steaming steak pasty in hand – I discover that it is the inventiveness and enthusiasm of Hotpod’s creator that is behind this very singular woodburning stove.

Dan munches gratefully on his pasty, reminiscing about his childhood in this place: “When I was a kid, horses would come to the forge to be shod.

Early every morning, Dad would be out in the forge making the shoes for the day. I used to light his fire for him a lot. It was great for him, having me do the fire, and for me, as a kid, lighting a fire was quite an exciting thing.”

Dan’s father is a blacksmith and a farrier, but to say that he has followed in his footsteps is only partly true.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, Dan saw the number of horses that needed shoeing dwindle. As fewer farmers and horse-owners came to the forge, his father went mobile, travelling around to shoe horses at stables around the West Penwith region of Cornwall. At the same time, the hand-forged iron gates and outdoor ironmongery that his dad made began to be replaced by machine-cut, mass-produced ironwork. And so Dan Senior turned to working on more restoration projects, in old houses, old ships and churches.

While his father was out on the road, Dan was often left to his own devices in the forge. He spent

hours after school, tinkering with metal work and learning his father’s trade. “I’m not officially a blacksmith, though,” he humbly explains. “I’m more a fabricator. Although I can forge.”

A blacksmith, I discover, is someone who furnaceheats metal in order to create the forms – it requires a six-year apprenticeship and a college qualification.

A fabricator will use a mechanical saw and shape the metal with a grinder. “But metal that is hammered hot is so much more beautiful,” says Dan, reverently.

“High-end forging is timeless – it’s really lasting.”

Fast-forward from early childhood to teenage years spent surfing, BMXing, playing in the woods around West Cornwall, tinkering with motor vehicles and an obsession with vans (VW Combis to be precise). It was during GCSE study leave that Dan began to help his dad make gates and railings, and by the time he was 17, Dan was living in a van, wondering how to improve on the heating that he and many of his friends used in their camper vans.

Cutting a gas bottle in half and joining the two halves together to make a wood-burning stove led to the birth of the Hotpod. Dan tried a few techniques and, by the third iteration, the style was born.

The Hotpod has a genuine personality. Its shiny steel legs were made from parts of a machine from a disused dairy, the round porthole ‘face’ was originally made out of a glass saucepan lid, and the door catches from VW engines. It has the sturdy presence of a potbellied stove, and yet has a sophisticated, industrial

PHOTO: JULIUS BRIGHTON

Metal that is hammered hot is so much more beautiful.

High-end forging is timeless.

Dan Harding

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PHOTO: BRIAN SHIPMAN

It has the sturdy presence of a pot-bellied stove, and yet has a sophisticated, industrial chic.

PHOTO: BOB BERRY

chic. It is one of the most highly efficient woodburning stoves on the market, a feature that was almost created by accident. Dan was trying to work out how to avoid the soot build-up on the inside of the glass, which afflicts so many wood-burners with windows. He worked out a way to divert the draft that is drawn in by the fire, sending it across the back of the window. “Just like a heater keeping your car windows from misting up, the air draft keeps the soot off,” he tells me. This technique also happens to help the wood burn more intensely inside the stove, rather than whooshing up into the flue and losing a lot of the heat that way.

The Hotpods quickly became very popular, with word of mouth bringing people from far and near to buy them. With an increase in orders, Dan decided to make the stoves out of cast iron rather than recycled materials, which didn’t initially sit too well with his deeply felt environmental ethics. That was until he went to visit the foundry in the Midlands. His eyes light up as he describes the scene: “In the warehouse, where all the melting pots are, they’ve got a big magnet on a crane and a most beautiful mountain of scrap cast iron. So there were train wheels and park benches – everything conceivable you could think of...”

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PHOTO: BOB BERRY PHOTO: DAN HARDING

It is a very easy leap to imagine Dan being part of a winning team on Channel 4’s Scrapheap Challenge, in which teams had to build a functioning machine from a pile of scrap metal. That was 15 years ago. Several years later, Dan’s down-to-earth demeanour appeared again on another TV show, BBC2’s Pay off Your Mortgage in Two Years, in which business expert René Carayol followed people’s efforts to succeed at various entrepreneurial ideas, and save enough money to pay off their mortgages. Dan, his partner Lucy and their two sons became regulars on the show – and Hotpod became a very successful enterprise.

Hotpods are still going strong – and Dan’s recently turned his hand to making smaller wood-burning stoves called Nautipods. Originally designed for a client’s boat, the cast iron shell is thinner, rectangular and designed to fit into small spaces. It’s another example of Dan’s characteristic attention to detail and inventiveness – he created a ‘heat shield’ to shroud the back of the stove, so that it can be tucked into a corner without overheating the walls behind. “It also helps it to act as a radiator,” he says, showing me the sheets of bent, sand-textured metal propped up against an ancient wooden workbench. The heat shield absorbs the heat and helps to diffuse it into the room.

As I watch him enthuse about his new creation, I wonder what the future holds. His boys are grown up now, and he and his yoga-teacher partner Lucy are freer than ever before to explore new pathways.

He is part of a local team that is trained in mine rescues, and plays bass guitar in one of the most dance-inducing cover bands in Cornwall. He says that he dreams of living off-grid – hoping to exist without dependency on electricity or piped fuel. It’s not such an unrealistic option in rural Cornwall, especially as he’s developed a new-found passion

Nautipod Number 1

for fishing and cooking outdoors on a fire. He also dreams of travelling – he has visions of working with blacksmiths in India, while Lucy furthers her learning of Iyengar yoga. One thing’s for sure: his great passion for fixing things – whether it’s filing off a rusty screw-head on a kid’s scooter, welding the handle back on a sieve, or re-building a wrought-iron gate – means that, like the blacksmiths of old, he will always be a vital member of the community. hotpod.co.uk

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For those who love exceptional design and products crafted with such attention to detail that they function superbly and look sensational, there is now a new Mecca for you – Hearth & Cook in Exeter.

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earth & Cook is an exclusive showroom displaying three of Europe’s most premium brands for heating, cooking and living: Morso, La Cornue and ESSE. Established by Rangemoors – the Westcountry specialists who’ve supplied and installed stoves and range cookers for more than 40 years – Hearth & Cook is all about offering top of the range appliances that make a statement and transform a room. The hand-picked collection on display all blend superb functionality with aesthetic appeal, and the showroom will be a destination for anyone looking for that level of quality. Hearth & Cook’s Robert Pocock says: “All the stoves and range cookers we’re displaying are at the premium end of the market and we’re the only showroom in the West Country to offer this breadth of appliances from Morso, La Cornue and ESSE.” Morso, the leading Danish stove designer and manufacturer, has been making cast-iron stoves since

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ESSE

1853 and have created a range that is both timeless and modern at the same time. “A Morso woodburner is a real investment, and when you choose a Morso you make a choice for life. We’ve worked with countless fireplaces, free-standing and wall-hanging situations, so we can help customers decide exactly what will work best in their home,” says Robert.

“Hearth & Cook offers a full installation service tailored to each customer’s needs, meaning peace of mind and the ability to simply get on with enjoying their beautiful new wood-burner.”

A range cooker is the heart of any kitchen, and there are two collections available at Hearth & Cook, which again exceed all the usual standards.

The popularity of British manufacturer ESSE is longstanding: each cooker is handcrafted, renowned for its superb functionality, durability and good looks. Since 1854, ESSE has featured in kitchens providing hot food and warmth at home and abroad and was famously used by Shackleton and his team

promotional feature during their 1914 Antarctic explorations. Today’s ESSE ranges blend tradition with innovation, using modern research and technology to design energyefficient range cookers. ESSE cookers are available in 23 different colour options, everything from powder blue to primrose yellow to matt black. Customers can choose from a variety of fuel options including: electric, gas, wood burning and oil. There are energy-efficient models that have four ovens and an induction hotplate; models that don’t need a flue; wood-burning models that could virtually take you ‘off the grid’ and models that can be controlled by a timer to work around you and your lifestyle.

From January 2016, Hearth & Cook will also proudly display an exclusive selection of cookers from La Cornue, the premium French range cooker manufacturer. These extraordinary cookers are considered the ultimate in culinary architecture and cooking quality. With the largest display of La Cornue appliances outside London, Hearth & Cook’s display of range cookers will impress even the most discerning chef, professional or amateur ‘foodie’.

Manufactured to order, each cooker in the Château range is an original, individually numbered by the craftsman who created it and custom-made from a huge range of colours and trims. With its trademark special vaulted oven, large solid brass burners and French plaque, the Château models offer the ultimate professional cooking performance. Robert says: “La Cornue ranges and rotisseries are admired worldwide by gourmets and are considered the pinnacle of cooking perfection. We are very excited to be able to showcase La Cornue products in the South West for the first time.”

Both ESSE and La Cornue cookers are presented at Hearth & Cook’s showroom in handcrafted kitchens. “To show them at their best, our fantastic cookers are displayed as live working models in beautiful bespoke kitchens created by Westcountry kitchen manufacturer Ashgrove Kitchens. The quality and finish of Ashgrove’s kitchens perfectly complement the prestigious range cookers. Visitors to the showroom will also be able to speak directly to an Ashgrove design consultant based at Hearth & Cook.

“Our aim is to bring the quality and provenance exhibited so strongly and successfully by our region’s leading restaurants and food producers, along with their sense of occasion, warmth and love of food, into the home,” concludes Robert.

La Cornue

Hearth & Cook showroom in Exeter is open Monday to Saturday 9.30am-5.30pm. Hearth & Cook hosts regular events, masterclasses and chef demonstrations. For more information visit hearthandcook.com or call 01392 797679.

Hearth & Cook, 14 Oaktree Place, Manaton Close, Matford, Exeter EX2 8WA.

Morso

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Female Angel on display at The Scarlet Hotel, Cornwall

Jilly Sutton is an acclaimed sculptor who works mainly as a wood carver from her Devon studio on the banks of the River Dart. Her work is largely figurative and sometimes abstract, and runs from the delicate to the bold and mighty, including wafer-thin moth wings and gargantuan wooden heads. Jilly’s wooden portrait of former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection.

Working with only locally fallen or felled trees, Jilly favours lime or cedar for its softness and sandblasts each piece to bring up the grain. “Wood is not stable, it splits, it warps, it rots; but it is the most loveable material and I love the sense of life you get from a tree,” she says. Jilly was represented by the Rebecca Hossack gallery in London for more than 23 years but is now going it alone. The Lemon Street Gallery in Cornwall and other sculpture gardens take her work. Many pieces can be found in public and private collections around the world.

Interview by Alice Humphrys. Photos by Kate Mount. jillysuttonsculpture.com

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Charcoal sketches

I always start by sketching. A lot happens by just drawing and drawing, it helps me to work things out. Although most go in the bin, ideas are formed and begin to emerge after masses of fiddling and scribbling around with charcoal. When the National Portrait Gallery commissioned me to carve a wooden portrait of Andrew Motion, he and his family came to my studio for me to do a plaster cast and drawings. We all sat here drawing him, it was quite fun. I drew him so many times that I was able to shut my eyes and draw his face from memory.

Forester’s chalk

I couldn’t live without my black forester’s chalk. I use it to draw on wet, greasy wood.

When big pieces of wood get delivered here, I start by drawing the shape of my sculpture onto the wood and a forester friend does the initial roughing out for me using a huge 24-inch chainsaw. I sometimes make a plasticine model and we refer to my sketches as we go.

We wear ear defenders for the noise, and sign language helps! He’ll cut a bit, then I’ll draw a bit, cut, draw, cut, draw until we have a piece that’s more manageable for me to work with on my own. Timber sometimes starts off at about 5ft in diameter.

Workbench and tools

This is my carving area. My workbench sits on a manual forklift so I can adjust the height to avoid backache. I have to work outside when carving as the sawdust and chippings get everywhere but the breeze coming off the River Dart blows it all away. These days I use mainly power tools – they’re so quick. I use an angle grinder to hollow things out with a diamond tip blade, especially made for wood. I also use chainsaws and various sanders to round off and smooth the edges.

Old surgical scrubs

I wear my daughter’s old surgical gowns as protective wear when using power tools – they have long elasticated cuffs and no opening at the front, which keeps all the dust out.

Branding iron

I don’t like putting my name all over my work but I do mark it with my initials ‘JS’. I use this branding iron and heat it up with a blowtorch until red-hot.

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Liming wax

I use liming wax to whiten most of my sculptures and to enhance the grain of the wood. I love the simple chalky tones of liming wax and it smells gorgeous. I rub it in with a brush and it soaks into the crevices of the wood and then I sand off what I don’t want, leaving a unique grainy character.

Hollowed-out heads

I hollow out the backs of my sculptures to cut away the very dense, hard heartwood; this has become a signature of my work. I do this to get rid of the tension and to avoid splitting. There are many challenges working with this stillliving medium but my endeavour in working with wood is to get it to do what I want it to do, as opposed to letting the wood dictate its fate.

African heads

Being mainly a sculptor I am drawn to the earthy tones of natural woods and I don’t really do colour, but I love blue – I spent some time in Nigeria in the late 1970s where I researched and learned the art of indigo dying in textiles; I did a lot of indigo dying for years after and blue has just become the most potent colour for me. These heads, carved in wood and cast in ‘olive stone’, are a little experiment for me. I love this dead flat, matt paint that looks like velvet.

The Elm Tree Project

PHOTO: KIM SAYER

I was out rowing on the River Dart one day and I noticed lots of dying elm trees on the slopes of the riverbank.

They were victims of the fatal fungal condition, Dutch Elm Disease [DED], that has killed more than 25 million trees since 1967. The deadly elm bark beetle flies at about 30ft, finds a gap in the bark and sucks out the sap but leaves behind the disease. The fungus stops the sap rising and kills the tree. I rang up the farmer, who I knew, to ask if I could dig them up to give them a new life. Along with my forester friend we dug up about nine trees including their roots, it was quite a feat! I wanted to give them new man/tree connections. Each tree is decorated to tell a different story celebrating family growth and the ongoing cycles of life. They are now on loan to the Scarlet Hotel in Cornwall, but every now and then I take them off to exhibit elsewhere. Last year they stood as an installation at my exhibition in Exeter Cathedral.

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Wood

I only ever work with wood indigenous to the UK and it’s easily available locally. Most of my supply comes from a network of local foresters – I would never cut a tree down especially for sculpture.

Wood is loveable, soft and living, although full of unexpected vagaries, and the nature of the material is always challenging. I prefer to work with cedar and lime; both woods are soft but they harden with age. I can only work with the middle section of a tree trunk – above the roots and well below where the branches start – because once the branches start the trunk is full of knots and the wood can split like crazy.

Dartington panels and birds

PHOTO: DEBORAH SCHENCK

There was a tree in the Tiltyard at Dartington Hall that came down due to old age in August 2014 – it was thought to be more than 170 years old.

The trustees wrote to me to ask if I would create a memorial using the wood. It was Monterey Pine and a lot of if was sadly rotten but I could make use of the enormous branches. Dorothy Elmhirst loved the tree and referred to it as Ghond. There isn’t much space for a freestanding sculpture at Dartington Hall so I decided to make three panels for the wall and they are now on display in The White Hart bar. This is the central panel showing the tree and the two either side include quotes about the tree, with some taken from Dorothy Elmhirst’s garden diary. For the night of the unveiling I also made 17 eight-inch wooden birds (pictured left) – one for every 10 years of the tree’s life – and these were sold on the night.

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Complementing the season It’s always a bind to get all those Christmas decorations out then so soon have to box them all up again, so as well as the baubles we’ve tried to come up with a selection of items that you could safely keep out beyond 12th night. It all comes down to keeping colours tastefully Christmassy – red, white and green, then adding some sparkle…

Frosty bauble, The White Company, Bauble, £10 Marks and Spencer, £6

Poster, The White Company, £45

Hyacinth, John Lewis, £8

Marks and Spencer Faux fur throw, The White Company, £175

Set of three English potted trees, The White Company, £18 108

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Fir and berry candle, The White Company, £35

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Vienna ivory paper lantern, John Lewis, £25 with bulb included

Assorted baubles, John Lewis

John Lewis Chelsea nest of tables, Content by Terance Conran, Iroka, £299

Scandinavian ivory paper lantern, John Lewis, £30 with bulb included

Star lights, Marks and Spencers, £15

Berry stem, John Lewis, £2.50

Frosted stem, John Lewis, £6

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Q&A

PHOTO: MATT AUSTEN

Mark Newbery is Managing Director of Sapphire Spaces, which opened in Topsham in 2012. Mark was inspired to launch Sapphire through working on his own property developments, from small renovations to larger new builds and conversions, and finding that well-designed products rarely made it down to the South West – most people looking for a design service and top brands were having to travel to London. Sapphire Spaces has since grown into an award-winning lifestyle studio specialising in residential design, recently winning the Ultimate Luxury Bathroom Design of the Year in the Designer Kitchen & Bathroom Awards, 2015.

What are you currently working on?

2015 was our our busiest year so far and we are currently working on a range of projects including a historic castle in North Devon, penthouse apartments in Exeter and Dorchester, and a stunning waterside new build in Cornwall.

How would you describe Sapphire as a business?

Sapphire Spaces is a design and home lifestyle business.

We started life as a specialist kitchen and bathroom studio but clients were soon asking us for help with other rooms such as dressing rooms, bedrooms, living rooms and home offices – we have even designed boardrooms! It made sense, as when creating a bathroom or kitchen for a client we always look at the home as a whole and how the client uses their space, so the flow into other rooms was a natural progression for us. The majority of our projects are in the South West and London but we also work on projects outside of the UK. We have just finished bathrooms and a dressing room for a property in the south of France.

What are today’s key rules in any kitchen design?

For us it is always function, form, personality and longevity. During our design process we spend a lot of time talking to the clients about how they live and use

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their kitchen. What may work for one kitchen won’t necessarily work for another. We often see lovely looking designs that don’t work on a day-to-day basis: for instance, a breakfast bar designed and sized for a run of three stools (placing items in threes is a well practiced design tool) will look visually impressive and work for couples and smaller families but becomes completely impractical for larger families.

Bulthaup is our kitchen manufacturer partner, which offers a good indication of how we design. A highly respected brand, it is very picky about who it allows to showcase its kitchens and we went through several stages of selection before being invited to become a partner.

Bulthaup wanted to ensure that we shared the same values and goals in terms of design, quality and customer service; for us, that the company is a small set-up suited us perfectly. We have direct contact with designers and technicians in the factory, and because everything is built to order we can specify bespoke options that the larger, offthe-shelf companies couldn’t accommodate.

What are the trends people are looking for these days?

People want a room that reflects their personality. Current trends play a part in our designs but quality materials and

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finishes that stand the test of time, such as solid wood and high-grade metals, will always take precedence over this year’s must-have colour. There is a current trend of mixing old and new. This is probably more of a design philosophy than a trend because, if done properly, it will look good for years to come. In terms of kitchen appliances and innovations, there has been a huge increase in the demand for boiling water taps over the last few years and pretty much all of our designs now include one. Our clients are busy people so anything that makes life easier! The V-ZUG Adora washing machine is particularly popular because not only is it the world’s most energy-efficient washing machine, it also uses steam to smooth out creases, meaning ironing is no longer necessary. There are many other benefits too, including a patented anti-mite programme that kills dust mites, so is particularly useful for anyone with an allergy or asthma.

You’ve just been awarded a place on the highly acclaimed ‘d-list’, Designer Kitchen & Bathroom Magazine’s Top 20 Designers in the UK. What is it that makes you stand out?

Creating beautiful designs that work and last, and remembering that you are designing for the client and not yourself. It’s an honour to be included on the d-list, which is a brand new initiative created to highlight some of the UK’s brightest and best kitchen and bathroom talent. A total of 20 designers were selected, according to Marin Allen-Smith, “from some of the most innovative and inventive product designers to the most exciting and creative kitchen and bathroom project designers – everyone on the d-list is one to watch, and all are names to follow over the coming years.” We’re proud also that fellow director David Aspinall has made it to the finals of a national design award for one of his bathroom designs.

The design was for a client in the Teign Valley who wanted a room with impact. This room is a guest en-suite and our clients wanted to create an interesting environment that guests would feel special in and remember.

What’s been your most challenging project?

It has to be the kitchen we designed a couple of years ago in Venice. The clients were brilliant, the building was

stunning and I was really pleased with my design, but getting the kitchen furniture, appliances, fitters and their tools to a site that has no road access was a challenge!

What are your sources of inspiration?

As a team we read industry magazines, meet with potential new suppliers, visit factories, manufacturers and attend design fairs and trades shows all over the world. We also work with suppliers who employ inventors, designers and innovators to evolve their products and technology so we learn about new advances early on.

Where is the market going in terms of kitchens and bathrooms and what does the future hold?

More and more people are designing homes around their kitchen. For many people, the kitchen is where they spend the majority of their time so it is important to get this aspect right. Over the years, open-plan living has become the preferred layout and our customers are looking for kitchens that blend in with the rest of the space. It is becoming increasingly popular to mix cabinet finishes and continue the cabinetry through to the dining and living areas. This offers excellent storage and gentle zoning of large spaces so the kitchen flows effortlessly into other areas of the home.

Interestingly, with open-plan living making us more social and interactive, we need a place to retreat to, which is why bathroom design is also changing. For our clients, gone are the days of white suites and shower cubicles; they want an experience and a place to unwind. White still prevails for toilets but baths and basins get much more interesting when it comes to finish, which allows us to create that ‘boutique chic’ feel. Technology is also playing a large part in bathroom design, with steam showers, automated bath fillers and waterproof televisions frequently on our client’s wish list.

When it comes to what will be everywhere before long, the answer has to be washlet toilets. It is not a new thing in Asia but is relatively new to Western society, although sales of these devices are rapidly increasing year on year. sapphirespaces.co.uk

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100% bespoke, handmade kitchens & furniture for the home

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Food

Devon and Cornwall’s best festive treats make the perfect foodie hamper Add some seasonal sparkle to your glass with winter-warming cocktails | Bites, the latest news and events from across the region in the run-up to Christmas | The Table Prowler

Make your Christmas taste extra special this year with our food editor’s pick of the best Westcountry foodie produce, including this handmade Christmas pudding from Figgy’s Puddings near Exeter. figgys.co.uk

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Anna Turns reveals the most indulgent Westcountry foodie treats on offer this festive season.

I PHOTO: THE CORNISH FISHMONGER

f you’re stuck with what to buy someone this Christmas, why not handpick a selection of artisan food and drink produce for them, either as stocking fillers or as a personalised hamper? Tailor your choices to their palate – perhaps they have a sweet tooth, a weakness for something boozy, or maybe they are a cheese fiend or fish lover. A bit like making a mix tape for your loved one, the secret is to put plenty of thought in before going shopping so your hamper is themed and adapted to their favourites. Get inspired with these mouth-watering delights and then get shopping at a deli near you. Adorn each gift with ribbons and decorations to make unwrapping all the more enticing and your hamper can become a work of art, taking pride of place under the tree.

Spice up snacktime with Portlebay Popcorn’s cinnamon swirl, handpopped at The Poppery near Plymouth. Made with warming cinnamon and a hint of apple, it’s the perfect accompaniment to a glass of mulled cider or port (from £1.70 per 75g bag). portlebaypopcorn.co.uk

Festive flavours from Salcombe Dairy ice cream include chocolate sorbet, brandy butter, Irish cream, cinnamon, chocolate orange and fig and sherry. Plus the ultimate scoop is Christmas pudding ice cream, which has all the ingredients of a traditional Christmas pudding but without the suet and flour. The 1 litre pudding is served in a round basin with a little brandy butter ice cream on top. salcombedairy.co.uk

The Cornish Fishmonger’s multiple award-winning smoked salmon is home smoked over oak chippings then beautifully boxed. This family-run fishmonger has been selling Cornish fish direct from the quayside for more than 30 years and delivers to your door within 24 hours. thecornishfishmonger.co.uk.

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food Five tiny taster jars bring together Christmas classics in one Bay Tree gift pack: cranberry sauce, onion marmalade, Morello cherry & vintage port jam, whisky marmalade, and cider and horseradish mustard (£7.90).

Alternatively, try the savoury Christmas pack which pairs Christmas pickle with Boxing Day chutney (£8.30). thebaytree.co.uk

Figgy’s makes a proper old-fashioned Christmas pudding with ingredients such as ten-year-old Somerset cider brandy from the Somerset Distillery and port stout from Hanlons Brewery. Husband and wife team Richie and Jo Evans make just a small number of their Christmas puddings each year in their artisan bakery near Exeter using an old family recipe. Each pud is matured for several months in earthenware bowls then tied up with a cotton cloth (£10 for a pudding for 2-3 people, £15 for 4-6 people and £20 for 8-10 people). figgys.co.uk

Dive into the world of Buttermilk, the Cornish artisan confectionery company. Sharing packs (£3.99) of peanut brittle, cookies and cream, caramel sea salt and chocolate fudge all make perfect stocking fillers and the larger selection gift box (£9.99) includes a mix of seven flavours.

Indulge! buttermilk.co.uk

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The stylish Coast and County range of kitchenware and festive goodies includes this quirky Christmas pudding flavour chocolate bar (100g, £2.95), made in Cornwall. Plus the Cream of Cornwall tea towel is available on its own (£8.95) or as part of a special festive gift set alongside a Cream of Cornwall fridge magnet (£10.95), both in traditional Cornish blue featuring the county’s foodie favourites from saffron cake to stargazey pie.

Email hello@proctorandclark.co.uk for stockist information.

Handpicked as one of only 25 products selected by Marks & Spencer for its range of branded artisan products, Blueberry Brothers’ spicy blueberry chutney, with its unique blend of cardamom, mustard and fennel, packs a punch on any cheeseboard or as an accompaniment to charcuterie (£3.99). theblueberrybrothers.co.uk

wearelittles.com

PHOTO: DAVID GRIFFEN

Little’s, the family-run flavoured coffee company based near Exeter, produces super highquality instant Arabica coffee perfect for the festive season. This Christmas Spirit coffee is infused with flavours of orange, brandy, cinnamon and vanilla (£2.75), and other tempting flavours include rich hazelnut and spicy cardamom.

Pick up a box of Trevithick’s Cornish pasties from Etherington’s Farm Shop in Redruth, made with Etherington’s meat. Provenance is key and Brian Etherington Meat Company has been supplying top quality meat from locally reared and rare breed animals since 1954. One box of 14 frozen pasties includes steak, veg and steak & stilton pasties (£47.99, free P&P). etherington-meats.co.uk

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Bell and Loxton’s new garlic and basil flavoured oils (£5.99) are both made with their award-winning cold-pressed rapeseed oil on their South Devon family-run farm. Great for dressings, dipping, drizzling, stir fries and roasting, these two new flavours have been created with guidance from chef Jay Allan of Hillside Foods.

South Molton-based artisan chocolatier Carlo Melchior has created a very special gift for the men in your life. Mixing luxury, artisan handmade truffles with a very generous shot of Jagermeister, each box contains 24 Jagermeister chocolate truffles and liquid liqueurs (£19.95), all individually wrapped in colourful foil. melchiorchocolates.co.uk

bellandloxton.co.uk

Bude-based Cornish Charcuterie produces this delicious rillette, made from locally reared duck slow poached in its own fat then shredded, seasoned and studded with cranberries that have been soaked in Grand Marnier (£5.95). cornishcharcuterie.co.uk

A gift with none of the gluten but all of the taste, Dartington Freefrom hamper (£35) contains goodies such as Easy Bean Moroccan Spice Crispbread, Hale & Hearty pizza mix, G Free Granny’s Fruit Cake and Moo Free Organic Cranberry & Hazelnuts Bar. Thrill chilli fans with a hot stuff hamper (£50) packed with fiery foodie favourites such as South Devon Chilli Farm smoky chipotle salsa, The African Chef caramelised chillies, Luscombe’s hot ginger beer and the Boom Kitchen Lady Naga Indian Restaurant Kit. Both available from: shopsatdartington.co.uk

Home Farm at Newton St Cyres is home to Mary Quicke, award-winning cheese maker.

Just in time for Christmas, she presents a new gift pack showcasing a wedge of Quicke’s Mature Cheddar, alongside Quicke’s Spicy Onion Relish and Charcoal Crackers (£11.99). quickes.co.uk

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PHOTO: southwesterndistellery.com

Christmas spirit Anna Turns gives the festive party season a kickstart with some wonderfully warming winter drinks.

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M

id-winter is the time to hunker down by the fire with a warming tipple, whether that’s a boozy shot of something to give you a kick into the party season, a glass of locally crafted wine or beer, or a Christmas mocktail. There’s no better way to celebrate the season than stocking up and filling your drinks cabinet with liquid treats, and even better if they are made in the West Country.

Devon and Cornwall are rich with craft brewers, distillers and vineyards, and every time I look there are more popping up.

First up, there’s Cornish Pastis and Tarquin’s Gin from Cornwall’s South Western Distillery. Come springtime, Salcombe Gin will be making its debut appearance, plus the handcrafted Wicked Wolf Gin has just launched on the wilds of Exmoor. Made with 11 botanicals, including grains of paradise, hibiscus and kaffir lime leaves, this spirit of Exmoor is blended on the banks of the River Lyn in North Devon in exclusive 25-litre batches. Husband and wife team Pat Patel and Julie Heap suggest serving their gin with ice and lime over a sprig of thyme to enhance the flavours.

Another more unusual Christmas spirit is Dappa, the Devon-made grappa concocted using English grape skins, including those from Sharpham Vineyard near Totnes. The man behind this potent drink is Cosmo Caddy, the grandson of Sharpham’s founder and a man who is passionate about creating the

nation’s first version of this Italian classic. Best drunk neat as a digestif with dark chocolate, strong coffee or as part of one of Cosmo’s cocktails, this Christmas spirit will be sure to liven up any party!

As it is the season to give in to temptation, most of us do spend more on drinks over the festive period that at any other time of the year, explains Jon Keast, owner of Scarlet Wines near St Ives and the man in the know about which bottles to buy. “December is the time of year when a lot of Devon and Cornwall’s brewers offer special Christmas brews,” says Jon. “These tend to be darker, deeper and inevitably a little stronger.” He recommends Exe Valley Brewery’s dark and lovely Winter Glow at 6%. “Alternatively, if you get the chance to be in Helston over the festive season, the infamous Christmas Special at the Blue Anchor is well worth a try. Rich and spicy, it almost needs a knife and fork, though at around 7.6% it is certainly not for the faint hearted!” There are plenty of cider makers across the West Country too, from Heron Valley in South Devon to Yarde Cider, which also produces a mean cider brandy on the banks of the River Dart.

Jon’s preferred winter warmer is a classic Whisky Mac: “Equal parts whisky and ginger wine, the warmth of the whisky works perfectly with the spiciness of the ginger. Of the better known varieties I’d go for Crabbie’s every time; but if you can find it, Lyme Bay Winery near Seaton makes a lovely local

PHOTO: scarlet-wines.co.uk

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version that would work perfectly. Just don’t use your best single malt to go with it.”

Of course, the biggest choice of all is selecting those special wines for Christmas dinner. Jon recommends the classics, and if you can afford to spend between £10 and £20 a bottle, you’ll get something really special from your local independent wine shop. “Reds from Bordeaux, Tuscany or Rioja, big barrel-fermented chardonnays and, of course, classic sweet wines like Sauternes, Tokaji or Vin Santo are all great choices.”

Meanwhile, Yannick Loué, owner of Le Vignoble at Plymouth’s Royal William Yard, recommends a plucky Pinot Noir if your Christmas menu includes white meat or duck: “A quality New Zealand Pinot Noir would match perfectly, being fruity and gentle, but for more power a Pinot Noir from Burgundy will bring many more robust qualities.”

It’s not all about the reds, though, and Yannick recommends a white from Burgundy to match roast turkey. “This wine will bring nutty, apple, lemon flavours, complementing the meat with both acidity and finish,” he explains. “For a slightly heavier meat such as pork, I would suggest a Rhone Valley white, which is made out of Marsanne, Roussane and Viognier – this will be more balanced, with the acidity cutting through the fat to clean your mouth, and good flavour to amuse your taste buds.”

A word of caution from Jon when it comes to bubbles: “You will, no doubt, see mountains of ‘half price’ Champagne in your local supermarket, but cheap Champagne often tastes just that – cheap. It can be all acid, with little flavour and little pleasure to be had.” This is a great time of year to splash out on locally produced sparkling wine, such as Camel Valley from Cornwall: “Their Brut is excellent but the Pink Pinot Noir is better. Also in Cornwall look out for Knightor; or in the far West, Polgoon.

From Devon, Pebblebed, Sharpham, Eastcott and Yearlstone vineyards all make great local fizz.”

Le Vignoble at Plymouth’s Royal William Yard is the perfect place to try new wines by the glass

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To finish off the Christmas dinner, port is the perfect tipple, especially if you are completing your Christmas banquet with a cheese board. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by the different types: white, crusted, ruby, vintage and tawny. Jon would select either a Reserve Ruby or a Late Bottled Vintage.

“Ruby is a simple young style but a Reserve is better quality. Vintage is the best possible quality of port but will be at least £30 per bottle. Late Bottled Vintage is a step towards this style for a lot less money. You can find either for somewhere around £18-£24,” Jon explains. “And when you open the bottle, treat it like wine – it will last a few days not half a year.”

For non-drinkers, try Luscombe’s cranberry crush, the ideal accompaniment to turkey and a colourful addition to the table. Or treat yourself to a bottle of Tom Morrow’s organic, sugar-free and biodynamic cordials, made at Landscove on the southern edge of Dartmoor. Their elderberry cordial is dark and smooth and high in anti-oxidants, and rosehip cordial is sweet, high in vitamin C and can be served with hot water. Also look out for their mulled cordial made from blackberry and elderberry cordials blended for a balance of rich and smooth with sharp and wintry, and spiced with cinnamon, cloves, mace and star anise.

Whatever your tipple, treat yourself and your guests to something special and enjoy experimenting with MANOR’s favourite festive cocktail recipes opposite.

MANOR’S CHRISTMAS DRINKS DIRECTORY Tarquin’s Gin, Wadebridge: southwesterndistillery.com Wicked Wolf Gin, River Lyn: wickedwolfgin.com DAPPA, near Newton Abbot: devondistillery.com Exe Valley Brewery, Silverton: exevalleybrewery.co.uk Blue Anchor, Helston: spingoales.com Heron Valley, Kingsbridge: heronvalley.co.uk Yarde Cider, Stoke Gabriel: yardecider.co.uk Lyme Bay Winery, Axminster: lymebaywinery.co.uk Scarlet Wines, St Ives: scarlet-wines.co.uk Le Vignoble, Plymouth: levignoble.co.uk Camel Valley Vineyard, Bodmin: camelvalley.com Knightor Winery, Trethurgy: knightor.com Polgoon, Penzance: polgoon.com Pebblebed, Topsham: pebblebed.co.uk Sharpham Vineyard, near Totnes: sharpham.com Eastcott Vineyard, Northlew: eastcottvineyard.co.uk Yearlstone Vineyard, Bickleigh: yearlstone.co.uk Luscombe Drinks, Buckfastleigh: luscombe.co.uk Tom Morrow’s, Landscove: tommorrows.co.uk The Magdalen Chapter, Exeter: themagdalenchapter.com The Shed, Falmouth: theshedfalmouth.co.uk

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The Magdalen Chapter’s mulled wine Serves 1

INGREDIENTS

• • • • • • •

75ml Shiraz 25ml port 12.5ml Grand Marnier 12.5ml lemon juice Pinch of nutmeg Pinch of cinnamon 3 cloves

METHOD

1. Warm a toddy glass with hot water.

2. Pour ingredients into a metal jug and use a steam wand to heat mixture gently then pour into the warm glass and serve.

3. Garnish with an orange slice and cinnamon stick.

Heron Valley’s mulled apple juice Serves 8 INGREDIENTS

• 2 x 75cl bottle of Heron Valley naturally sweet apple juice • 1 Heron Valley mulling spice bag • Wedge of fresh apple to serve METHOD

1. Put the apple juice and spice bag in a pan and gently heat together, allowing the spices to infuse with the juice without boiling.

2. Serve in heat-proof glasses with a wedge of fresh apple.

3. You can also add a shot of winter Pimm’s, sloe gin or spiced rum to each glass and top up with mulled apple juice for a brilliant warm winter punch.

Dappa’s Citrus Twist Serves 1 INGREDIENTS

• • • • • •

15ml clementine juice 10ml lemon juice 10ml Cointreau 1 egg white 1 spoon of sweet mincemeat 50ml of Dappa Devon Spirit METHOD

Tarquin’s Negroni Serves 1 INGREDIENTS

• • • • •

1 part Tarquin’s Gin 1 part sweet vermouth 1 part bitters Ice Orange disc

METHOD

1. Add ingredients to a rocks glass and stir well.

2. Garnish with an orange disc.

3. As a variation, this drink can be topped up with sparkling wine.

1. Add all ingredients in shaker with ice and shake hard, strain everything back to your shaker and shake for a second time to break down the proteins in the egg white.

2. Fine strain into a chilled flute.

3. Garnish with three orange rinds thinly cut.

4. Serve with homemade mince pies.

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Bites

Get cosy Lord Peregrine RumpusCosy, the eccentric badger character behind social enterprise Radiant’s vintagestyle restaurant in central Plymouth, is hosting enticing woodland-inspired festive events. From winter menus featuring ingredients sourced locally from the hedgerows, forests and streams (try anything from game to venison and even bunny burgers!) to Badger Cub’s high tea for little ones complete with a mini teapot of babyccino, and a sparkling high tea Christmas feast (£14pp or £18.50pp including a glass of Prosecco, available daily 3-5pm during 1-23 December). The posh four-course Christmas suppers (£26pp) include sorbet palate cleansers (but, of course) and the enchanted Christmas grotto is far from red and white... imagine a secluded clearing in the trees where the wild animals congregate. Other worldly and totally magical.

RumpusCosy, 12 Derry’s Cross, Plymouth PL1 2TE. 01752 604837 rumpuscosy.co.uk

Christmas in a cup These Cornishware mugs make the perfect gift and can be personalised with your own message, names or special dates (£1 per letter). From £10 for 6oz mug (perfect for babyccinos) up to £15 for 15oz mug to suit big tea drinkers.

Available at John Lewis or buy online cornishware.co.uk

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Introducing the second edition of the South West Indy Coffee Guide Celebrating ‘The science and theatre of coffee’, this second edition looks more in depth at the future of coffee in the South West, the coffee and cycling scene, the science behind milk foaming and discovers some of the bizarre stories behind sourcing coffee direct in Africa. For the first time there’s also a brew glossary, more maps and an index to make the guide even easier to use.

With a total of 107 coffee shops and roasters from across the South West, Devon and Cornwall venues include Coasters Coffee Company in Kingsbridge, Devon Coffee in Exeter, Hub St Ives and Strong Adolfo’s near Wadebridge, plus the region’s best artisan coffee roasters including the likes of Crankhouse Coffee.

South West Indy Coffee Guide (£7.99). indycoffee.guide

In the good books Chef Ben Tunnicliffe’s restaurant at Sennen Cove has been included in The Good Food Guide just months after opening the doors for the first time. Ben says he’s thrilled to see his restaurant, Ben Tunnicliffe Sennen Cove, included after its very first season: “This recognition is a fantastic achievement for the whole team who have worked so hard to set and maintain high standards during our first – and extremely busy – summer of operating here at the beach.”

Ben has been a champion of Cornwall’s food and drink scene since he settled here in 2001 and for this new project he has created a menu combining his love of seafood with family-friendly classics. He adds: “We have received a great welcome from the local community, and have planned a series of events to ensure that the restaurant will be a real hub of activity all year round. It’s a great privilege to offer hospitality in this stunning location and our ethos involves respecting the surrounding landscape and the beach lifestyle here at Sennen.” benatsennen.co.uk

Ice and be merry Decorate your own traditional Christmas cake. Either bring your own 8” fruit cake or tutor Christine Hawker can provide one at an additional cost of £20.

Christmas Cake Decorating course: 28 November. Philleigh Way Cookery School, near Truro. £70. 9.30am-1.30pm. philleighway.co.uk

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Padstow Christmas Festival Famous for its celebrity chef demonstrations and traditional Christmas market featuring more than 100 producers, the 8th Padstow Christmas Festival will see some of the UK’s finest chefs showcasing their culinary talents. TV chef James Martin is a brand new addition for 2015 and Glynn Purnell, a regular guest chef on Saturday Kitchen alongside James, also makes his debut at Padstow this year.

Rick Stein OBE, who has championed the festival since it began in 2008, says: “This is always a special weekend for me and last year I did a demo with two of my sons, Jack and Charlie, which was a real highlight.

The buzz in the back of the demonstration kitchen is electrifying.” Bringing an eclectic range of culinary styles to the event, Angela Hartnett of London’s Murano, Michael Caines of two Michelin star Gidleigh Park in Devon, and award-winning chef Mitch Tonks are just some of the big personalities making their return.

Rick continues: “What I love about it is we’re all chums and it will be great to welcome newcomers James Martin and Glynn Purnell to the festival family this year. Every year it seems a little larger and better, but don’t worry, it’s never going to get too big – it’s the small scale of it which makes it so special.”

Championing the county’s reputation for gastronomic excellence, Cornish chefs including Paul Ainsworth, Nathan Outlaw, Rick and Jack Stein and Tom Hunter show their signature flair for cookery.

Padstow Christmas Festival Festival Illuminated Padstow Quay

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3-6 December. padstowchristmasfestival.co.uk.

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DON’T MISS...

5-6 DECEMBER Nadelik – A Cornish Christmas Enjoy a family Christmas the Cornish way with fireside tales, traditional dancing, mulled wine, mince pies, carol singing and crafts in the castle keep. 11am-4pm. Pendennis Castle, Falmouth TR11 4LP. Admission charges apply.

5-6 DECEMBER Fowey Christmas Market The town comes to life with Christmas sparkle and food and drink stalls. 10am-4pm. foweymarket.co.uk 6 DECEMBER Plymouth Good Food Market More than 40 Devon and Cornwall food and drink producers gather on the lawn in this waterside venue.

10am-3pm. Royal William Yard, Stonehouse, Plymouth.

8-13 DECEMBER Truro Victorian Christmas Market With a food hall full to the brim with festive liqueurs, chocolate, preserves and other foodie treats. Lemon Quay Piazza, Truro. trurochristmasmarkets.com 8, 15, 22 DECEMBER Totnes Night Market Mulled cider, street food, Christmas treats and mistletoe line Fore Street and the High Street. 3.30-9.30pm. totnesnightmarket.co.uk

UNTIL 19 DECEMBER Exeter Christmas Market From baklava to speciality meats and cheeses, a great opportunity to buy special foodie gifts.

Cathedral Green, Exeter.

19-20 DECEMBER Christmas Fair Enjoy mulled cider and tasty mince pies, seasonal food and drink, and browse local Devon craft stalls.

The Shops at Dartington, Shinners Bridge, Dartington, Devon TQ9 6TQ. 20 DECEMBER Totnes Good Food Market This award-winning market brings its special Christmas twist to the town. 10am-3pm. Market Square, Totnes. totnesgoodfood.co.uk .

23 DECEMBER Christmas Night Market A festive feast bursting with Exeter’s finest street food vendors. From 4.30pm. Piazza Terracina, Exeter. exeterstreetfoodmarket.co.uk

Send your food news and stories to food@manormagazine.co.uk

FESTIVE TREATS

FISH AND SHELLFISH FRESH FROM CORNWALL thecornishfishmonger.co.uk

AWARD WINNING SEAFOOD

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Signature dish Matt Downing, head chef at Exeter’s Magdalen Chapter, shares one of his Christmas favourites.

Recipe: Stollen Serves six INGREDIENTS

• • • • •

100ml warm milk 2 tsp dried yeast 2 tsp caster sugar A pinch of salt 225g plain flour, allowing extra for dusting • 1 tsp ground mixed spice • 200g mixed dried fruit METHOD

1. Place the milk and yeast into a bowl and mix well. Leave to sit for 5-6 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, sift the salt, sugar, flour and mixed spice into a large bowl.

3. Add the dried fruit, almonds, butter and mix well.

4. Add the yeast and milk mixture and mix well.

5. Add the egg and stir well to make a dough.

6. Knead the dough for 5-6 minutes, then cover and leave to prove for 20 minutes.

7. Uncover the dough and turn out onto a clean, floured work surface. Using your hands, knock the dough back to reduce the volume, then knead the dough for 3-4 minutes.

8. Push and roll the dough out by hand into a flat oval shape about 23cm x 18cm.

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• • • •

25g flaked almonds 50g unsalted butter 1 free range egg, beaten 250g marzipan

TO FINISH

• 25g unsalted butter, melted • 50g icing sugar

9. Roll the marzipan into a piece about 18cm x 5cm, place the marzipan into the centre of the dough, then fold over the sides of the dough to seal in the marzipan.

10. Place the Stollen seal-side down onto a greased baking tray. Cover and place somewhere warm to prove for an hour.

11. Preheat your oven to 180°C / 365°F / Gas Mark 4.

12. Place your Stollen on a baking tray and into the oven to bake for 40 minutes, or until golden brown and cooked through.

13. To finish, remove your Stollen from the oven, brush with melted butter and dust with icing sugar immediately and allow to cool.

14. Serve sliced and with a hearty glass of mulled wine.

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The Table Prowler The Drewe Arms It’s not easy being a pub these days. What with cheap supermarket booze and the smoking ban, pubs have had a hard time competing with home. Consider, then, rural pubs, which during the winter months not only have to contend with supermarkets taking people’s hard-earned beer money but also the weather. To survive as a rural pub these days you have to offer something different, something that will make locals trudge through the snow to get to you, and those more peripheral to get behind the wheel in driving rain.

The Drewe Arms in Drewsteignton has all the character you’d expect of a rural Dartmoor pub. Dating back 400 years, this heritage thatched pub has changed little in the last hundred. It serves a wide range of local ales and wines through a small hatch, and boasts the longest serving landlady in UK pub history – Mable Mudge, or Aunt Mabel as she was known, held the licence for 75 years until she retired at the age of 99 in 1995.

The Drewe has a menu of no-fuss gastro staples, including fish and chips, and rump or ribeye steak with a variety of treatments. Both my companion and I chose ribeye steak (£18.95), mine with garlic prawns and his with a simple garlic butter sauce. There was a wait, but I put this down to being a small kitchen serving a Friday night crowd. When the

food did come, the visual impression was good: the steak was generous without being overwhelming, and accompanied by roasted cherry tomatoes and three large prawns in their shells that had the glistening, slightly charred appearance of shellfish cooked on a griddle then tossed in garlic butter. Chips, always a measure of a pub’s culinary quality, were thick, reassuringly hot, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and served separately in a bowl.

Both steaks were cooked perfectly to our specification (I’d requested mine medium rare) and impressively tender. The prawns along with tomatoes made a tasty accompaniment and the chips were perfect for soaking up the buttery sauce and tomato and meat juices left on the plate.

We came away sated and impressed, and vowed to come back on a Wednesday night, which is fish and chip night, and apparently draws quite a crowd. It may be cold outside and the wine in the fridge may beckon, but nothing beats having a quality meal cooked by someone else in an ancient but cosy old pub. thedrewearmsinn.co.uk Food 9 | Service 7 | Location 8 | Ambience 8

St Kew Inn My mother had come to stay and I decided to take her and the children to Daymer Bay, stopping off at The St Kew Inn en route. This is a favourite stop as it is a pretty pub with a sizeable garden that on a sunny day the children can race around in while the adults chat.

We were about 15 minutes into the journey when it became clear we were going to be late. I’d booked a late lunch table and knew, as with most country pubs, the kitchen would shut promptly. As the children chattered in the back and my mother turned silent, eyes glued to the road, my driving turned to rally and the cortisol levels started to rise.

St Kew is a very pretty little Cornish village that seems to have remained untouched in hundreds of years. The pub is set in a dip adjacent to the village church, and is a very together, tasteful pub with four different areas to eat, depending on your mood. It is a professional set up and the girl behind the bar looked officious. “Your table was booked for…” is never what you want to hear when you’ve driven at breakneck speed to get to a restaurant, but at the look of desperation on my face she followed it with, “I’ll see what I can do.”

We were seated in the red-walled dining room, tastefully minimalist with stripped wood floors. I chose the salt and pepper squid (£6.95) followed by the seafood gratin (£14.95), my mother had beetroot soup (£5.95) followed by the dressed crab (£14.95). The children had the beer-battered goujons and fries.

Somewhat disappointingly, as I’d been anticipating squid E&O-style, irregularly cut complete with tentacles in a light salt and pepper batter, the squid arrived in regular rings fried in a dark orange batter. It was tasty enough but shape and colour let it down a little. The gratin arrived looking considerably more appetizing – in a deep scallop shell filled with an abundant mix of fish and prawns, just as the menu had promised, in a cream and buttery sauce; the breadcrumb was goldened to a perfect crisp. It was delicious, although quite rich, and given that my stomach hadn’t entirely settled from the mad journey, I couldn’t finish it. My mother happily obliged, also finding it delicious. Her crab was fresh, a mix of brown and white meat, also delivered in its shell, and and the mayonnaise suited it well.

The only let down was the accompanying carbs: sad-looking new potatoes crying out to be tossed in parsley or mint butter; the bread, which came shop-white or brown, crusts still on, buttered and cut diagonally, seemed more egg and spoon greasy caff than classy gastropub.

In all, though, we enjoyed the meal, and the children’s food looked equally good – it’s always a relief to find a restaurant that doesn’t scrimp on the children’s menu – plus the environment is sophisticated, a lovely place to spend time, inside and out. stkewinn.co.uk Food 7 | Service 8 | Location 8 | Ambience 7

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* Terms and Conditions apply visit www.cornishgems.com/offers/early_bird_2016 MANOR | Winter 2015

escape

Escape

Snowy adventures above the Arctic Circle Luxury retreat in Cornwall complete with reindeer

PHOTO: ADJ BROWN

gwelanmor.com

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Miranda Gardiner heads to Finnish Lapland for deep snow, cloudberry pancakes and the aurora borealis.

F

or the last decade, the last week in February – half term, week 8 or, as the Finns call it, simply the ‘ski holiday’ – we have visited Finland. We go to see my brother’s family, ski – cross country and downhill – and to enjoy snow that is normally waist deep. For the last couple of years, snowfall in the south of the country hasn’t been so reliable, so this year we went above the Arctic Circle into Finnish Lapland, to a traditional village of only 400 inhabitants, called Äkäslompolo.

FRIDAY

We rendezvoused with the Finnish side of the family in Vantaa airport, Helsinki (or HEL, to use its departure board abbreviation) and flew together on the one-hour trip to Kittilä, 170km north of Father Christmas’s home in Rovaniemi. Arriving on the tarmac at Kittilä felt like we had stepped into the Arctic tundra against a giant bluescreen background.

The airport is small but beautifully designed, with spruce plywood cut-outs of bear and elk on the baggage collection and minimalist curved wood.

My sister-in-law, Leena, had visited the cabin where we were staying in the 80s, but couldn’t remember exactly where it was in the dark and snow. We had no idea what we were going to find, but from past experience the Finns never disappoint!

SATURDAY

The Wizard’s Hat cafe or Velhon Kota

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We had one of the older cabins in the village, crafted from whole trunks of larch, some even with Sami inscriptions on them that had faded to a range of silvery greys. Inside the cabin there was a generous drying cupboard for our snowy outerwear, antler coat hooks in every room, a huge dining table with a candle and reindeer antler chandelier, and plenty of reindeer throws on the benches. A wood-burner was in the middle of the room with a basket of dry birch logs for the first fire.

escape

On Saturday morning the thermometer read minus 35. We wrapped up and went to check out the slopes in the afternoon at Ylläs. From Ylläs Fell you look across to the mountains that lead further north into the Arctic. Ylläs started as a small ski resort in the 1930s for wealthy Finns and there are some black and white photographs in one of the huts on the slopes showing Finns skiing in woollens with wooden skis.

WEDNESDAY

The mercury had warmed up to around minus 15 by midweek. I downloaded a northern lights app, which kept pinging me alerts over dinner, mainly from locations on the other side of the frozen lake in the middle of the village. We looked out of the bedroom window from the top of the house and couldn’t see anything in the sky, so my teenage son Raz and I decided to put our skis on and go for a midnight ski. We skied down the road, past the houses with reindeer in the front garden ( just as we might have a few chickens here) and around the village, trying out the night time ski tracks. We then took a small dark slope onto the frozen lake and thought it might be fun to ski around the lake at night, but didn’t get far, as there seemed to be figures on the other side of the lake; quite a group – maybe ice fishermen sitting with their rods through the ice. There was no movement for ages, until one turned slowly towards us. The

There were antler coat hooks in every room, a huge dining table with a candle and reindeer antler chandelier, and plenty of reindeer throws on the benches.

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Above the lake and just above the tree line, the clouds started coming together and forming shapes. Flashes went off from the ‘spotter trolls’ and we watched the aurora borealis ebb and flow on our skis from the frozen lake.

strange quality of light distorted the perspective and in the dark we even started to imagine these figures were small trolls! As we skied closer, it became apparent that these figures, who were huddled on the ice, all facing in the same direction, were not fishermen with rods – or even trolls – but a group of northern lights spotters, sitting with their tripods and cameras, thick coats and flasks of hot drink.

At the same moment, above the lake and just above the tree line, the clouds started coming together and forming shapes. Flashes went off from the ‘spotter trolls’ and we watched the aura borealis ebb and flow on our skis from the frozen lake.

Watching the sun set from the frozen lake

FRIDAY

Lapland is king of the cross country ski trails: these are made by machines that keep the tracks fresh daily.

Many Swiss fly north from the Alps, to use the long well-mapped trails that run between villages and lakes. There are some interesting cafes in the woods that you can only get to by skiing, the owners use a snowmobile to bring in supplies. On the last day, my daughter Magi and middle son Bear skied with me to a hut called the Velhon Kota, about 11km away. The track was mainly level with the occasional downhill to whizz down and hill to goose-step up. It took us just under a couple of hours to ski there. The wooden hut, made from whole birch trees, was like a massive wooden yurt and shaped liked a wizard’s hat. Inside, it was lit by candles only, and had paganlike moss decorations on the table and a stuffed bird in flight hanging from the ceiling. A small spritely man, who it turned out had built the Velhon Kota, offered us reindeer or cloudberry pancakes and berry juice. We crossed the floor to take a seat and as soon as we sat down, our pancakes arrived: reindeer for me, the pancake probably made from spelt or rye flour, with sour cream and finely chopped red onion, the reindeer meat flaked into the hot filling; Bear’s cloudberry pancake was equally delicious, sour jammy cloudberries with cream. We got up to order a second round and the same thing happened – our pancakes arrived as we reached the table. It felt magical, in a 1970s Mr Benn way, as there didn’t appear to be anyone else in the kitchen!

On the last evening, around 9pm, my brother and sister-in-law alerted us to the display across the night sky: intense greens that were doing an aerial show

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Skiing to the Velhon Kota

The hut

escape across the whole village. We got into our gear and skied down the road. As we nearer the supermarket before the lake, there were two separate displays of green light that cartwheeled together and formed an arc, which we skied underneath. Down on the lake, capturing the celestial event with my camera proved impossible, so I ended up taking some rabbit-inthe-headlights pictures of us looking at the sky. We enjoyed the show into the early hours of Saturday morning, until we remembered we’d better get some sleep before our flight home in the morning.

What to pack: Comfy snow boots: Sorel do great winter boots that have pure wool inners and a waterproof outer.

Camera with spare battery and charging unit: camera batteries don’t last long at temperatures below zero.

Getting there: To Äkäslompolo and Ylläs from the UK. Ylläs is located 150km north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. The Ylläs area consists of two original Lappish villages: Äkäslompolo village is on the northern side of Ylläs Fell and Ylläsjärvi village on the southern side.

By plane to Kittilä Fly from London to Helsinki and then on to Kittilä airport, which is 40km to Ylläs and 55km to Äkäslompolo village.

Night train from Helsinki Take the train from Helsinki to Kolari railway station, which is is 35km from Äkäslompolo village and Ylläs.

Christmas at Bovey Cas#e December Dining in !e Great Western

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Festive dining in Smith’s is available to a minimum of 6 people and must be pre booked.

Bovey Castle vouchers make a perfect gift for family and friends. We offer a wide selection of vouchers for overnight stays, activities, afternoon teas, golf & spa treatments.

Monetary vouchers are also available, perfect if you can’t decide what to buy.

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@boveycastle

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Reindeer and luxury lodges amongst the Cornish countryside makes Gwel an Mor a unique winter getaway.

L

ocated in stunning Cornish countryside with sea views extending past wintry woodland to Portreath beach, Gwel an Mor is a luxury resort with a difference. Needless to say, Poldark got here first, as did a number of discerning hotel inspectors: meaning ‘view of the sea’ in Cornish, Gwel an Mor boasts a host of awards under its belt and was chosen as the Cornish home to the Poldark cast and crew during filming of the highly anticipated second season.

This five-star resort offers everything you’d expect in terms of luxury: a spa, indoor pool, gym and leisure facilities to pamper and rejuvenate guests, plus – and highly popular with both locals and guests – a Mediterranean-inspired menu at The Terrace restaurant overseen by Spanish-born Executive Head Chef Joe Lado.

The accommodation at Gwel an Mor is highend, spacious but cosy, and choices range from Scandinavian-style two-storey wooden lodges to the newer Residence retreats. The single-level Residence

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lodges feature woodburners, underfloor heating and private hot tubs to relax in under the stars. Sleeping six, they’re ideal to enjoy with friends or family.

A truly unique aspect of Gwel an Mor – and a particular highlight for guests with children – is the Feadon Farm Wildlife and Conservation Centre.

Feadon Farm creates hands-on encounters and learning opportunities with the tame, and often rescued, animal residents. Here you can learn to fly birds of prey, hand-feed foxes, or, in a winter highlight that borders on the surreal, meet the reindeer brothers – Nadelik and Lowen. Their names mean ‘Merry’ and ‘Christmas’ in Cornish.

So now you’ve expanded your Cornish vocabulary, jot it down. Gwel an Mor, the resort with a view of the sea and everything you could wish for in an active or relaxing luxurious Cornish retreat, along with reindeer. There is no place quite like it. gwelanmor.com

escape

PHOTO: ADJ BROWN

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SHEBBEAR COLLEGE DEVON

My Playground

My Battleground

My Future

My Home from Home

My Challenge

My Investigation

My Performance

My Weekends

Prep School | Senior School | Sixth Form | Day School | Weekly Boarding | Full Boarding | www.shebbearcollege.co.uk

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Celebrating 175 Years of Fine Education

MANOR | Winter 2015

For teachers and parents of children studying in the South West Schools news in brief Unusual twinning scheme helps break the poverty trap

Exeter School fund-raising concert FOR MANY PUPILS, parents and National Trust supporters, the beginning of the festive season is heralded by the Exeter School Concert in aid of the National Trust in Exeter Cathedral. For the 15th year running, the concert showcases the school’s senior orchestral groups, brass and choirs in the magnificent Cathedral setting.

This year, highlights within the programme promise to be performances of Sibelius’s impressive Finlandia by the Symphony Orchestra, whilst the more intimate Chamber Orchestra will play excerpts from Warlock’s Capriol Suite.

Two of Britten’s beautiful choral works will be performed: Hymn to the Virgin sung by the Chamber Choir and This Little Babe by Middle School Choir; the Senior Choir, featuring around 80 singers, will provide a popular flavour with songs by The Beach Boys and Coldplay.

Around 200 pupils ranging in age from 11 up to 18 will be making this year’s concert on Tuesday 8 December a night to remember.

Assistant Director of Music at Exeter School, Tom Brimelow, said the National Trust Concert was one of the highlights of the school’s musical calendar. “Around 200 pupils are involved each year, with the experience of performing in Exeter Cathedral to an audience of many hundreds being a wonderful opportunity for all our singers and instrumentalists.”

KIND-HEARTED PUPILS at a Mid-Devon school have raised enough money to provide some essentials facilities for villages in Nepal – toilets. The children in Form 5CO at Blundell’s Prep School, Tiverton, took part in the Toilet Twinning Scheme organised by the charity Tearfund and came up with their own ideas on how to fundraise. They held a bake sale and asked for sponsorship for completing a 3km fun run and a litter pick in the school woods, raising a total of £480. This will be used to buy one toilet block for a school and three separate toilets for three villages in Nepal.

The Toilet Twinning scheme provides people in the poorest communities on the planet with basic sanitation, clean water and hygiene education.

In recognition of the pupils’ fundraising, the loos at Blundell’s Prep School will be ‘twinned’ with those in Nepal and the school will receive a colour photo of their ‘twins’ and GPS co-ordinates so they can be located on Google Maps.

Blundell’s pupils on their fund-raising fun run

Percussion masterclass from Welsh National Opera brings music to life at Millfield Prep PAT KING, timpani player in the Welsh National Opera and teacher at The Royal College of Music and Drama, joined the Music department at Millfield Prep in Glastonbury, Somerset, to host a percussion masterclass for visitors and pupils.

Pat King and two of his students opened the event with an interactive demonstration on the bongos and drums. Pat also took the opportunity to offer feedback and helpful tips to all the day’s performers.

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Practice makes perfect In Help Your Child at Home, Professor Ruth Merttens provides parents with advice on how they can assist their children’s learning. In the fourth part of this exclusive series for MANOR, she focuses on helping older primary school children (7 - 11 years) with reading.

T

here comes a point where children can read or ‘decode’ many of the words in simple books but are not yet fluent, confident readers able to read anything they come across. This is the point at which things can come a little unstuck. Typically, the child has gone past the stage of needing to point at every word as he or she reads and is able to have a fair stab at most school books, making only a few mistakes. But they still regard reading as a chore, and cannot yet be described as ‘active readers’.

So how can you help your child to keep going?

It’s a question worth asking because if they enjoy reading at this stage – if they form a ‘reading habit’ – it is likely that they will continue this habit into adulthood. This increases the likelihood of success at school and also makes the range of pastimes and interests open to them much wider.

Parents are key players here. There are several ways in which we can really help. Firstly, the move from decoding to reading fluently is one that requires lots and lots of practice, so it’s our job to help provide

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as many opportunities for that practice as possible.

Nowadays, there are just loads of different contexts in which it is possible to practise reading. Some of these, like stories – whether in a book or an electronic format – are read by starting at the beginning and carrying on to the end. Non-fiction books are very different. A History of Dinosaurs will be organised so that we can dip in and out, looking at photographs and illustrations, using the index or contents pages to find interesting stuff. A website about lions will have headings, pointers and links to follow. Recipes, or instructions on how to make loom band bracelets, are read sequentially, but in short, easy, one-sentence bursts. Reports of a football match or descriptions of a new toy can all be attacked in the same way, in bite-sized sections. So each of the different types of text require different reading skills and strategies.

The more experience and practice your child has in reading a wide variety of texts, whether with you or alone, the better her reading will become.

Secondly, it is vital to keep storytelling and

school narrative going whilst your child is struggling to become a fluent reader. If you have been sharing bedtime stories with your child since he was little, keep going! It remains an ideal chance to share some special time together and for you to get an idea of the things that most interest your growing child.

And discovering new stories or returning to your old favourites from childhood is often just as enjoyable for mum or dad.

Of course, many children cannot wait to read by themselves. ‘I read it in my head’ is a genuine milestone for children and one they can be rightly proud of – it’s all part of their growing independence. However, making sure that children listen to stories, especially those that are above the level at which they can read themselves, is vital.

These can be story CDs, those you have downloaded specially from the internet, or they can be books that you read to them. This is the stage at which it is most important to read ‘chapter books’ to your child – books where the story is carried on over many evenings and each chapter takes us only one stage further on. Sustaining a narrative over one or two weeks is a vital part of learning, and without practice in this, children quickly start to suffer in educational terms. Choose stories on topics or from genres that stimulate or interest your child. Also read them stories that meant a lot to you as a child – undoubtedly your child will be motivated to listen and like these too!

Even if your child appears to have no interest in reading (and she isn’t alone!), she probably is interested in a programme on telly, or perhaps she has a favourite film. Nowadays there are often fiction and non-fiction books based around children’s television programmes, whether it’s High School Musical or Doctor Who. And lots of programmes, such as Tracy Beaker or Horrid Henry, start off as stories in books. Even looking at a programme’s website is a great opportunity for reading practice, which can lead to your child discovering further reading material that she might be interested in.

The twin keys to success here are motivation and practice. As said earlier, it does take a lot of practice to move from mere decoding to fluent reading.

And we need to help children enjoy this practice.

If children do not start to discover that reading is pleasurable, they will regard it as an activity you do only to please someone else – a teacher or a parent.

That means they do not learn to ‘read-for-pleasure’.

We need them to want to read as well as to be able to read! The children who succeed in education are, with very few exceptions, readers – children who have learned that reading has the potential to bring as great a pleasure as any activity and more than most.

So, at this critical stage, what should parents do and not do? Here are some dos and don’ts to help…

•

DO read to your child, as often as you can, and quite independently of her reading practice. Read books harder than she can read herself. This will keep her motivated to want to read and will also keep developing her narrative skills.

•

DON’T think that because he can decode a page of words, he is now reading and your job is done!

The most important part is still to come. Keeping your child motivated to choose to read is vital, not only for him to succeed at school but to open the door to years of reading for pleasure.

•

DO, in reading practice, choose books slightly harder than she can read with ease, and then give loads of help. You read one page (the harder one) and then she reads the next one, and so on, talking turns through the book.

•

DON’T worry if your child re-reads favourite books. Re-reading is a big part of becoming confident and also of learning to take pleasure in reading. We all re-read favourite or special texts – it is natural and wholly beneficial.

•

DO encourage your child to read a wide variety of texts, including online. If you are looking for information – the time of a film you plan to see, or the instructions for making something or a Deadly 60 account, encourage the child to read the text with you – or, even better, to you.

•

DON’T think that reading comics, magazines or information found online somehow ‘doesn’t count’ as reading practice. We want to encourage our children to read and to enjoy reading!

•

DO keep reading yourself – for pleasure.

Children are much more inclined to do as we do rather than to do as we say. There is simply no substitute in terms of motivation for seeing your mum or dad, siblings, nan or granddad loving to read and discussing a book.

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school GAMES AND FUN ACTIVITIES These activities help children to enjoy words and sentences and also to expand on their knowledge of fictional characters. Consequences is a traditional game, very useful for developing narrative writing.

Eat, walk, look...

Preparation: cut up a large cereal box to make small cards – you need 24. Write these words on the plain side of 6 of the cards: eat, walk, look, say, run, rest.

With your child: write synonyms for each of these words on three cards. E.g. for eat: you could write ‘gobble’, ‘munch’, ‘scoff’.

To play • Spread out the cards face down • Take turns to turn over 2 cards. Read them.

• If they match, i.e. mean approximately the same thing, you can keep them.

• If they don’t, turn them back over face down.

• Play until all the pairs are collected. Who has most?

Consequences

Preparation: have some pieces of paper and pens and lots of good story ideas! Fold each piece of paper into four horizontal sections.

To play • Take a a piece of paper and a pen each. We will each write a simple story.

• Write ‘when’ in a corner of the top section, ‘who’ in a corner of the second section, ‘where’ in a corner of the third section and ‘what’ in a corner of the bottom section.

• Now write something in the ‘when’ section of the page. E.g. ‘Last Tuesday...’ or ‘On Christmas Eve ten years ago...’

• Fold the page so that what you have written cannot be seen.

• Pass the piece of paper, carefully folded, to another person.

• Now write something in the ‘who’ section. You continue writing your story. This is important!

• Fold the paper over and pass it on.

• Write something in the ‘where’ section, still continuing your story, and pass it on.

• Finally write something in the ‘what’ section.

• Open up all the papers, and take turns to read the bizarre stories!

Play again!

Cross it out

Twenty questions

To play • Together, find the longest sentence you can see.

One of you writes it out.

• Now play a game where you take turns to cross out one or more words from the sentence but leaving it so that it still makes sense!

• Cross out one or more words leaving a sentence that still makes sense. Now pass it to your partner.

• They do the same – they must leave a sentence that still makes sense. Cross out as few words as possible each time.

• Keep playing until someone cannot cross out any more words. They lose!

• Start with a new sentence and play again.

To play • You take turns to start.

• The person starting thinks of a fictional character. It can be from a book or a film or a TV series – but it must be one everyone will know.

• They say the first letter of the character’s main name – i.e. the name they are known by (Harry Potter would be H, so would Heidi, etc.)

• The other players have 20 questions to find the character’s identity. The person answering can ONLY answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

• If a question is asked to which the person answering does no know the answer, they have to give a clue!

• When you have guessed the character, another person has a go at choosing a character – remember it must be fictional!

Preparation: choose a book or another text that you or another person has been reading. You also need paper and pens or pencils.

Preparation: none required! This makes a really good car game!

HELP YOUR CHILD AT HOME PART FIVE In the next part of this exclusive series, Professor Ruth Merttens will focus on how to help younger primary school children (4 - 7 years) start writing. If you have missed an issue and would like to access a part of the series, please write to school@manormagazine.co.uk

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happy days *Independent day and boarding education* * Nursery to Sixth Form*

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60 seconds to surf

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CONTACT t: 03333 445757 e: info@burringtonestates.com www.burringtonestates.com 142

MANOR | Winter 2015

property

Property

The Bulletin | Property of note: Middle Traine, Modbury Snapshot comparative

Hutswell Farm, Washfield, Tiverton. On the market with Savills. Guide price ÂŁ695,000 - see Snapshot comparative on page 153. savills.com

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NEAR KINGSBRIDGE, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ1,750,000

A magnificent Georgian country house with approximately 12 acres of landscaped gardens and paddocks with a 2 bedroom detached barn conversion, stables and tennis court. The property is superbly presented and is only approximately 5 miles from Kingsbridge and 5 miles from the sea. EPC Ratings F & D. Web Ref 53951.

Superb country house | stables and paddocks | detached barn conversion For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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property

The Bulletin As one year draws to a close and another starts, talk usually turns to predictions and hopes for the future, particularly in terms of house prices. Imogen Clements peers into 2016.

I

t’s that time of year when the frenzied transacting of property subsides and the experts predict what will happen in the next. Property-related conversations will doubtless abound over the turkey as you try to make sense of price hikes, price slumps, regional variations, interest rates and mortgage regulations to determine if 2016 is to be the year to sell, buy that second home, trade in the London property to relocate, or do nothing.

“It’s all relative” is doubtless what someone will say (because they always do) when of course it seems it isn’t. London property prices have rocketed over the last ten years compared to the rest of the country and look set to continue growing, albeit less so in the prime central sectors (for which Stamp Duty rises have helped put the brakes on), more so in London’s emerging areas, such as Harrow and Dagenham, as younger affluent buyers choose to buy there rather than more outer-lying regions.

Over in the South West, there will inevitably be sighs of “We never should have sold our London property”, and the sage down the end of the table will nod sympathetically and announce, sage-like, that to move out of London means never moving back in. But would you necessarily want to?

The government seems intent on spreading economic prosperity geographically, plus more and more entrepreneurs are taking advantage of less crowded and costly corners of the UK in which to move and develop their businesses. Plus, with the Cameron pledge of fast broadband to every home and business by 2020, ‘commuter belt’ as a term will likely be an anachronism for most of us. There simply won’t be the need to commute daily to a central London office, so why remain in such close proximity to it, paying for the privilege?

Could this perhaps be idealistic? Possibly, but if growth in economic prosperity in other parts of the country doesn’t encourage London migration or consideration of alternatives for first-time buyers, the capital’s unaffordability surely will. Property inflation is way beyond wage inflation, with the gap set to grow wider, meaning for younger generations, all their money goes into property and little else. There is no pooling of investments (and spreading of risk) that our parents and grandparents enjoyed, and no guarantee that house

prices will continue to rise and provide the nest egg that our parents and grandparents currently enjoy.

So what about the South West? What do the indicators suggest will happen here? Savills is widely regarded as the most authoritative forecaster on Britain’s property market after successfully predicting both the 2007-09 downturn and the bounce back since. According to their latest forecasts, growth in prices in the South West will be 19.9% in the next five years, with prices next year rising by as much as 6%.

Compare this to London’s 15.3% over five years and 5.5% next year, and it looks pretty favourable to anyone considering investing in the South West, or looking to sell in 2016.

But like all broad brush averages they mask the mixed bag that lies underneath. William Morrison of Knight Frank, Exeter errs on the side of caution. “We’re more likely to see those sort of increases at the midlower end of the market. Sellers (many with experience of London) who have been overambitious, and buoyed by forecasts, are often unable to sell at the price they’ve set their property at. Pricing remains absolutely key, and I would advise that if you hadn’t sold this year then you should carefully reassess your guide price for any re-launch in 2016.”

Richard Addington of Savills, Exeter concurs. “My view of what will happen next year is that we will see modest growth, if that, in the sector of the market that can’t be supported by the local economy – essentially, properties £850,000 and above – and healthy growth in the lower-priced mainstream sector where price increases, particularly in urban areas or within easy access, will exceed inflation and interest rates, resulting in positive real growth. The higher-priced properties that are likely to see growth next year will be within the best secondhome market sector. Easily managed waterside properties in particular will enjoy real growth.”

Both would indicate that price rises are likely to be lifted by growing SW urban influx, which in turn would indicate an economic recovery that is, as hoped, extending geographically. If this turns out to be so, we will, according to Lucien Cook of Savills, “finally see a dampening of the London-centric price growth that we’ve become so accustomed to.”

So perhaps, pipes up the quiet one over dessert, it’s time to move on, and set sights elsewhere.

Pricing remains absolutely key, and I would advise that if you hadn’t sold this year then you should carefully reassess your guide price for any re-launch in 2016.”

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1 2

savills.co.uk

Sold

Sold

OTTERTON, East Devon

DARTMOUTH, devon

4/5 bedrooms ø private mature grounds ø annexe ø home office ø double garage & off street parking

Unique opportunity for conversion ø spectacular loft space ø PP already granted ø contemporary open plan design ø allocated parking

Guide £725,000

Guide £450,000

Savills Exeter raddington@savills.com 01392 455 755

Savills Exeter sjchick@savills.com 01392 455 755

3 4

Sold

Sold

HAWKCHURCH, devon

NR DARTMOUTH, devon

3 reception rooms ø 5 bedrooms ø garage & stables ø range of stone barns ø lawned gardens ø 2 enclosures, paddock, grass manège

7 bedroom house ø 4 reception rooms ø guest house ø indoor pool complex ø mature garden ø private beach

Guide £875,000

Offers in excess of £6 million

Savills Exeter raddington@savills.com 01392 455 755

Savills Exeter raddington@savills.com 01392 455 755

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MANOR | Winter 2015

1 2

savills.co.uk

Sold

Sold

PORTLOE, THE ROSELAND, cornwall

TREVONE, PADSTOW, cornwall

Stunning views over the coastline ø stylish high quality finish throughout ø south facing sun terrace ø 2/3 bedrooms ø living room ø lounge/bedroom 3 ø conservatory ø lawned rear garden ø 1,549 sq ft ø EPC=F

Stunning views over the bay ø 3 reception rooms ø kitchen with AGA ø 3 spacious first floor bedrooms ø 3 further second floor bedrooms ø sunroom ø pretty garden set to lawn ø parking and integral garage ø 3,438 sq ft ø EPC=D

Guide £650,000 Freehold

Guide £1.5 million Freehold

Savills Cornwall mrowe@savills.com 01872 243 200

Savills Cornwall mrowe@savills.com 01872 243 200

3 4

Sold

Sold

MALPAS, TRURO, cornwall

ROCK, cornwall

4/5 bedrooms ø 4 bath/shower rooms ø vaulted sitting room ø wrap-around balcony ø tidal creek frontage with foreshore ø private pontoon ø terraced gardens & sun deck ø summer house ø garage & parking ø 2,516 sq ft ø EPC=C

5 bedrooms ø private steps to porthilly beach ø first sale since 1986 ø redevelopment potential ø 2,336 sq ft ø EPC=F

Guide £1.2 million Freehold

Guide £4.5 million Freehold

Savills Cornwall bmdavies@savills.com 01872 243 200

Savills Cornwall jcunliffe@savills.com 01872 243 200 MANOR | Winter 2015

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Within walking distance of Modbury’s many amenities yet boasting the grounds and grandeur of a country estate, Middle Traine really does offer the best of both worlds.

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any who move from the metropolis to the countryside imagine a charmed existence in a rural, rose-clad idyll in which to while away their days listening to nothing but the buzz of bees and whinny of ponies. What they forget is how convenient town-living is. Everything – shops, entertainment, pubs and amenities – are within walking distance and bustling communities inject you with energy around the clock.

Most of us want our cake and to eat it, too – the land, beauty and peace that a home in the country offers, with the fun and ease of the city. Note to estate agent: tranquil house, please, with space, buzz and convenience, plus quick and easy access to stunning coast and open countryside. Not much to ask.

Enter Middle Traine – a Property of Note on many counts, not least because it offers just that: easy walking access to independent shops, cafes and amenities in the highly sought-after South Hams town of Modbury, along with the grounds and grandeur typical of an elegant country house.

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property of note

The six-bay colonnade of Roman Doric columns and balustrade to the front of the building is considered to be one of the finest in South Devon.

“My wife and I moved down from London some years before we acquired Middle Traine,” says owner Alan Strowger. “The purchase was one of those fortuitous chains of events where we’d sold our own house, and the property we were due to buy was unexpectedly taken off the market, leaving us just four months to find another. We knew of Middle Traine and I heard through an agent that it was about to go up for sale. I expressed keen interest and asked to be the first to view it, leaving said agent with my exact whereabouts over the next few days (this was before the time of mobile phones). I was tracked down on a Saturday night at dinner with my wife and daughters prior to going to the theatre, and was told that the owner of Middle Traine was there now, and given that they’d begun marketing the property that day I could be the first to view it if I came immediately. I left my family at the restaurant and headed over. Following a quick look around I offered the asking price on condition that no other viewings would take place. This was accepted but I was told the owner was going away for six weeks on the Tuesday, which would have delayed exchange.

I knew I had to move fast and stated then and there that we would exchange prior to him leaving. My wife saw the property the following morning and we exchanged contracts 36 hours later, on the Monday evening. We have lived here for 28 years – it was clearly the right snap decision.”

The entrance hall

The drawing room

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Middle Traine is the main section of a large Georgian house believed to date back to 1790, with Victorian additions. It is listed in Nicholas Pevsner’s Buildings of Devon, and the six-bay colonnade of Roman Doric columns and balustrade to the front of the building is considered to be one of the finest in South Devon. Walk through the front door and you enter a glorious mosaic-tiled entrance hall boasting a wide staircase with a cast iron balustrade that leads up to a galleried landing. “This rather grand hall has hosted plenty of social occasions,” says Mr Strowger.

“We’ve had numerous drinks evenings, and invited choirs and Russian singers to give recitals and carol concerts on the stairs. It really is a wonderful space and never fails to elicit a ‘wow’ from anyone who enters the house for the first time.”

After the performance, the audience would often move into the enormous 30ft drawing-room leading off the hall, which has two fireplaces of Ashburton marble and windows lining the facing wall overlooking the front portico.

Walk along the tiled passageway leading off the grand hall and you reach the back of the house and the garden. ‘Garden’ being something of an understatement: if the exterior of Middle Traine is head-turningly impressive, the interior awe-inspiring, then the grounds of this highly individual home are positively jaw-dropping.

They open onto a gravelled seating area that leads to a two-acre terraced expanse of land sectioned to suit every mode and occasion. The garden’s been well looked after but not formally landscaped since Victorian days and boasts many facets: wild, romantic and sporting. Steps lead down from the first terrace to

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an immaculate lawn tennis court. “We’re big tennis players and have hosted many tournaments here,” says Mr Strowger. “Tennis would be played daily by numerous local players throughout the summer months such that we became a local tennis club. I’m told by Ivybridge coaches that the court (which doubles as a croquet lawn) is one of the finest grass courts in Devon, something I’m rather proud of.”

The section of garden nearest to the house is planted with rose and flower beds, and adjacent to the tennis court is a putting green that backs onto a paddock complete with stable and tack room. The grounds extend down further to an orchard of apple and pear trees, and a bluebell woodland walk that leads to a large pond fed by a spring in the adjoining well.

What this house conjures up, with its beautiful and varied grounds, are scenes from classic novels: tea and tennis on the lawn on a quintessentially English summer afternoon, EM Forster-style, followed by The Secret Garden for those looking to lose themselves in the

property of note

The two-acre grounds extend to an orchard of apple and pear trees, and a bluebell woodland walk that leads to a large pond fed by a spring in the adjoining well.

magic of bluebells and woodland, then Swallows and Amazons on arrival at the pond…

Despite the size of the house, the Strowgers have ensured there is no area of Middle Traine that’s underused. “There are three floors and seven bedrooms but my wife and I use two rooms on the first floor as our studies, plus we have a morning room on the first floor because it is such a light room and a lovely place to be.

“On the third floor there are two bedrooms, a bathroom and a sitting room/play room. Our daughters lived on this floor during their teenage years as it offers perfect seclusion from parents. It could equally make ideal nanny accommodation.”

As active members of the community – both Mr and Mrs Strowger were lawyers and ultimately judges – the family held many parties and gatherings at Middle Traine. “It’s a house that invites happy gatherings. There were winter parties in the hall and drawing room; summer parties on the lawn and terrace. My daughter celebrated her wedding here with a large marquee, and the band played down by the pond.

“Now, both our daughters are in their 40s and living in London with their families. We want to be nearer to

them, so we are doing the reverse of what many couples of our age do and heading back into London rather than retiring to a country cottage.”

How someone talks about a property distinguishes the house from the home. There is a note of fond nostalgia in Mr Strowger’s voice as he describes Middle Traine. “Although large, it’s a warm house, literally (it is gas centrally heated throughout) and metaphorically. It has good vibes. There are so many aspects to it, so much that it has given us all, that of course you want the right people to buy and appreciate it in the way we have.

“I’ve always had the attitude,” he concludes, ”that with a house like this it’s a privilege, and that you don’t ‘own’ it as such. Really you’re just tenants, looking after it and leaving it in a better state than you found it, such that successive occupiers can enjoy it just as much as we have.”

Middle Traine is on the market with Marchand Petit, Modbury 01548 831163 and Savills, Exeter 01548 800462 for £895,000. marchandpetit.co.uk

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NEWTON FERRERS, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ1,750,000

A superb waterside residence offering light and contemporary 4 bedroom accommodation with outstanding southerly estuary views, private jetty and outhaul mooring. EPC Rating D. Web Ref 72161.

Waterside location | private jetty and outhaul mooring | superb contemporary accomodation For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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property

Snapshot comparative A selection of superb properties from around the region, and one from the capital, all under £700,000.

Country

Washfield, Tiverton, Devon Guide price £695,000 Hutswell Farm is a Grade II listed four-bedroom farmhouse set in about 12 acres of its own land with an additional oakframed barn conversion. The land comprises woodlands and therefore a convenient supply of logs for the winter, lawned gardens, and paddocks. The barn conversion can either be used as additional guest accommodation, or to provide an income, making the property an ideal holiday home or a full time residence. savills.com

Melcroft, Hoopern Avenue, Exeter Guide price £625,000

Town

Melcroft is a four-bedroom detached house situated in a prominent position on Hoopern Avenue, a popular cul-desac within the Pennsylvania area of Exeter. The property has a garden, two spacious reception rooms and is well located, being within easy reach of the University, city centre and local amenities. knightfrank.com

Little Pengarrock, St Keverne, Helston, Cornwall Guide price £650,000

Waterside

Single-storey house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on The Lizard Peninsular, recently renovated to a high standard with workshop, office and detached onebedroom annexe. Set above the village of Porthallow with views over the beach and out to sea. The landscaped gardens overlook the bay and the village and there is good parking. knightfrank.com

Shelburne Road, Islington, London N7 Guide price £695,000

London

A large two-bedroom lateral apartment on the ground floor of this Victorian terrace, set on the end of a terrace of similar houses. The apartment has a shared communal entrance (with two other properties only), private landscaped garden and additional interior patio and is extremely convenient for all the amenities on Holloway Road. savills.com

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Near Fowey, Cornwall

Enchanting and peaceful riverside setting Lerryn 1.7 miles, Fowey 4.3 miles via ferry, Bodmin Parkway 9 miles (London Paddington 3 hours 41 minutes), Newquay Airport 24 miles (All distances and times are approximate) A charming family home with direct water access onto the River Fowey. 6/7 bedrooms, 3 reception rooms, 3 bathrooms. South and west facing terraces, vegetable garden and 600ft of foreshore, private slipway, 2 running moorings and a quay. Substantial parking area and double garage. EPC: E. In all about 8.5 acres.

Guide Price ÂŁ1,550,000

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KnightFrank.co.uk/Exeter christopher.bailey@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Polruan, Cornwall

A prime waterfront family home with direct water access

KnightFrank.co.uk/Exeter christopher.bailey@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Fowey (via passenger ferry) 200 yards, Par (via car ferry) 8.5 miles (London Paddington 3 hours 53 minutes), Newquay Airport 27 miles (All distances and times are approximate) South-west facing with direct water access to one of the sought-after estuaries in the South West and panoramic views out to sea. 4/5 bedrooms, 2 reception rooms. Parking, detached double garage, davit, slipway, foreshore and beach (owned by the Duchy of Cornwall). EPC: F. In all about 1 acre.

Offers in excess of ÂŁ1,500,000

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KINGSTON, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ1,000,000

A beautifully presented family home set in fabulous grounds with countryside views and indoor pool within walking distance of the outstanding Wonwell Beach on the edge of the popular village of Kingston. EPC Rating E. Web Ref 88835.

Idyllic setting with panoramic views | Wonwell Beach 1 mile walk away | organically managed land and woodland approx. 4.8 acres For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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KINGSWEAR, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ1,150,000

A stylish 5 bedroom period property set in an elevated private position with wonderful creek and river views across to Dartmouth. Magnificent decked balcony, 3 reception rooms, contemporary kitchen/breakfast room, gardens and ample parking. EPC Rating D. Web Ref 88642.

Superb creek and river views | detached house in tranquil setting | private garden For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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Be blown away...

Henry Swanzy Honing perfection

Unique Home Stays Character in exclusivity

Bovey Castle

A Dartmoor icon reborn

Simon Armitage Poet, troubadour

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Michael Morpurgo

Green living, South West

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Design inspired by nature

After Eden

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A caring town

ST TUDY INN, CORNWALL Seasonal delights

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PORTHMINSTER CAFÉ, ST IVES Kitchen gardening

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Christmas all wrapped up

Sir Tim Smit

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A kitchen garden for all

Gift guide

The best story I ever wrote

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Ethical fashion pioneer states how it is

Festive food Packed hampers

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Hearths and Hotpods

Oscar-winning director goes small screen

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here can be few smells more universally appealing than the smell of wood. Freshcut wood shavings. This is the scent that accosts you when you walk into Henry Swanzy’s workshop on the docks in Falmouth. The senses are in heaven here – not just this aroma, but above Henry’s workbench is a window overlooking the glittering water and gently swaying yachts of a peaceful marina. And then there are the pieces themselves. In varying stages of creation, there are planks of wood, half-turned legs and completed stools, benches and tables. Eminently tactile, everything invites you to reach out and touch, stroke and rest your hands upon it. This, I realise, after talking to Henry, is what happens when you look at hand-finished work. You are drawn to the character and personality in the wood – it is the natural imperfection, both in the material itself and in the human intervention. Production-line furniture, no matter how exquisitely designed, just doesn’t have that visceral draw…

Henry Swanzy first started making furniture 17 years ago, spending many years creating bespoke hand-made pieces for commission in workshops in London before setting up and running his own studio in Wiltshire. This is a man who knows his business. Looking at the sketches littering his desk and printouts of prototypes, it is obvious that there’s a marksman’s precision in the way he creates furniture, too. “I have a real love of simple physics,’

Orinoco bench and detail (opposite)

he enthuses, explaining in detail how a small wedge inserted into the top of a table leg can hold the entire thing together with no movement and no need for any other attachment. He turns to the Bareppa coffee table: essentially a glass top slotted into three large wooden pins. The tapered oak legs are tilted outwards at an angle and the glass sits perfectly into the ‘heads’. A black bungee is looped between the legs – giving the table a functional aesthetic. “It is the simplicity which really pleases me,’ says Henry, demonstrating how the table can be assembled in less than a minute. “The angle of slot on the legs is what provides the strength, the bungee cord just holds the legs in place.”

The combination of simplicity of form and functionality is evident in all of Henry Swanzy’s work. The handmade element is fundamental, too. “There’s a Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi which really explains the way I see my work,” he says. “It’s based around the acceptance of transience and imperfection.” The challenge for artists and craftsmen like Henry is the mass production of pieces – particularly those made in China - driving prices down and making hand-worked furniture more difficult to market. But there is still a vital element which is missing in production-line furniture, Henry explains: “I would like to think that what we produce is fairly readily identifiable as not having the very crisp machine-made manufacturing line aesthetic, and there’s just little subtle elements which give it this

food

seasonal delights

PHOTO: POLLY RENWICK

Provenance, producers and

Anna Turns meets Emily Scott, who is creating a simple yet exquisite seasonal menu at the revamped St Tudy Inn.

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PHOTO: DANIEL SCOTT / theheadthetail.com

itting outside the St Tudy Inn in the sunshine, chef Emily Scott is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the season’s first asparagus. “A local farmer called Roger will bring the first harvest to the pub in his horse and cart, and I won’t put asparagus on my menu until the day he turns up!”

Five miles from the North Cornish coast in the picturesque village of St Tudy, Emily is transforming the local pub. “I feel like I’m in the middle of the French countryside, which is odd because Burgundy is where I first learnt my trade,” says Emily. “This pub feels like my home now.” With relaxed French-style interiors, natural stripped-back furnishings and fresh white walls, every room is a reflection of her personality and her food is simple yet beautiful to match.

In the kitchen, she’s intuitive - “I don’t often use the timer, I feel when something is done” - and there’s a certain elegance to her cooking that perhaps only a woman can achieve in this predominantly male industry. “Whenever I have worked alongside other chefs on demos, they have always been brilliant.

Some say they can tell my food is cooked by a woman because there’s an extra finesse to it.”

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