Western Daily Press
20 March 2010
His designs light the catwalk, the stage and the home, and now Jasper Conran is celebrating the greatest fabric inspiration of all – The English Countryside.
Mr Conran has spent a year travelling the country recording people and events, and the landscapes which have helped to form them.
The results appear in his book Country, with evocative photographs by Andrew Montgomery, to be published by Conran Octopus on April 5.
The West Country features strongly. Mr Conran has known the villages of Somerset/Dorset border since childhood. He attended Port Regis and Bryanston Schools and is now governor of Bryanston.
Those living around Henstridge are lucky enough to be close to a community apple press, bought by residents and run by Patricia Thompson. She is among those featured.
Mr Conran says she is a formidable woman who at one point in her colourful life was a newsreader in Senegal.
He continues: “She has made a real difference to the lives of small-scale apple growers in the area. Rather than regretting the apples rotting in our gardens, sheds and kitchens, we take them over to Patricia.
“After a few hours in her barn, chatting chopping and pressing, you have enough juice to last the rest of the year.
“As so often happens in such enterprises, the collective is a boost to morale. In recent years, many community shops, several hundreds across the country, have sprung up to compensate for the decline of the traditional village shop. Publicly owned pubs are a more recent variation on the same idea.
“It is reassuring to know that, by acting together, you can make a positive difference to your lives.”
Mr Conran, patron of the Work-Life Balance Trust, adds: “There is a life-enhancing quality about going to the farm and seeing Patricia at work. The atmosphere is rich with autumnal smells: the homely old barn, the wooden shelves, the muddy floor, the boxes of apples waiting to be pressed, the fresh scent of the juice. Ripeness seems to permeate the air.”
On a village green near Cheltenham, he discovers an old-fashioned travelling circus: “With a ring of old wagons surrounding a small big top. News of the circus had spread by word of mouth. For every night of its week-long stay, the tent was packed.
“I doubt anyone was disappointed. Gifford’s Circus is irresistibly exuberant, with acrobats tumbling, trapeze artists flying and amazing displays of horsemanship. There’s violin-playing loose-rope walker, a breathtaking knife juggler, a genuinely funny clown, an unusual range of performing animals such as geese, ducks, shire horses and a man in a bear costume. It has a deserved reputation for creating show business magic in the depths of the countryside.
“There are about 50 performers and crew led by Nell Gifford who learned her trade in Europe and the United States before creating her own company in the Cotswolds a decade ago. ‘It’s a rural show aimed at a rural audience,’ she says. She and her husband grew up in the area. ‘Many of us are country people, and most of the people who come to watch are country people. In the circus, we have farmyard animals and a tractor too.’ In winter, the core of the troupe retreat to a farm near Stow-on-the-Wold where they transfer their skills to agriculture.”
Back in Dorset he admires the contentment of landscape gardener, Andrew Dodge, looking after chickens alongside a few cows in a rented orchard in Halstock while further east in Marshwood Vale, he finds potter Tim Hurn, pursuing his craft in a converted dairy, amid the smell of clay and woodsmoke.
“Country’s an idea – a texture, a flavour, a state of mind,” he says. The mixture of “man-made and natural beauty, of old and new, of wild and tame,” it is merely entrusted to us and we need to cherish it.
