Ludlow Food and Drink Festival

Ludlow’s gourmet reputation has been growing ever since Michelin-starred chefs Ken Adams and Shaun Hill opened restaurants in Ludlow years ago. Claude Bosi earned two Michelin Stars for his Corve Street restaurant Hibiscus, and is now moving to Mayfair - allowing another Michelin chef to move in behind him.

Ludlow is not just about high-end, gourmet food though - as the founders of the Ludlow Marches Festival of Food and Drink fully appreciate. They are a team of volunteers, with links to the Slow Food and Cittaslow (or Slow City) movements, and make sure the food festival stays with its feet on the ground, anchored among small, quality food producers.

To take one example, there are still four traditional butchers trading in Ludlow, all producing quality meat and meat products like home-cured bacon and hand-raised pork pies, made in much the same way they always have been. Locally-reared animals slaughtered locally and processed locally, using traditional craft skills; that’s what leads to quality butchery and not factory farming and processing.

What leads to quality bread? Traditional, slow fermented dough, argues Peter Cook, which is how his firm, Price’s Bakers on the market square, still produces bread. Of course, there are also Walton’s, Swifts, and DeGreys using their hot ovens to create quality alternatives to steam-baked, factory-made, lorry-delivered and plastic-wrapped supermarket bread. 

The truth is, Ludlow has never really become fast - it has retained a natural, traditional slowness and its location, about an hour’s drive from the nearest motorway in any direction, has surely helped. But Ludlow is still very much a working market town - not a museum.

The Food Festival is as much a celebration of local beers and local sausages as it is a celebration of gourmet fare. 1,800 people take the Sausage Trail, sampling five new festival sausages on the Saturday of the Food Festival, and not a celebrity chef in sight. Instead of TV ‘faces’, you’re much more likely to find exhausted, small-scale producers of delightful foodstuffs at the Food Festival. Producers who have been taken by surprise by the demand for their products on the first day, and who have stayed up all night to make more in time for the even busier Saturday...only to have to repeat the process again for Sunday.  This dedication goes a long way to explaining the popularity of the Food Festival - visitors will always find new surprises, new producers and new flavours as well as all their old favourites.

Telephone 01584 875053