Country & Garden: Country Matters - To market, to market to buy a fat

On a fine, frosty Saturday morning there is no more cheerful place in Gloucestershire than the farmers' market in Stroud. At Cornhill - a small, colonnaded square - low sunlight streams over the crowd of shoppers; delicious hints of frying bacon and mulled wine drift on the air, and through the hubbub come snatches of music from an accordion and violin.

Everyone is in genial mood - and so they should be, for the market is proving a runaway success, not only in raising revenue for the stall-holders, but also in bringing people into town. Pedestrian counts taken last October showed that on a normal Saturday 7,500 people passed along the streets, but that on a market day the total rose to 17,500.

The accent is strongly on local produce. The National Association of Farmers' Markets recommends that "local" should mean coming from within a 30-mile radius. Here, almost everything is from within 25 miles of Stroud, and a high proportion of the produce is organic: cheese, beef, pork, lamb, venison, trout, vegetables (from the Prince of Wales's Duchy Home Farm at Highgrove), honey...

The festive atmosphere is enhanced by the frankness of the stall- holders. "I don't know what went wrong with this one," says Melissa Ravenshill, holding up a lump of Birdwood cheese made at Huntley, west of Gloucester. "It just wouldn't go blue. I need to fiddle with it a bit."

The Cerney Cheese products, on a stall alongside, all consist of or include goats' cheese: they range from fresh little pyramids five days old to the Cerney Banon, a ripened variety, and take in pizzas, spinach quiche and Yorkshire curd along the way. Marion Conisbee- Smith, the cheesemaker, used to keep goats, but she became so addicted to manufacturing that she has given up the herd and taken to buying the milk.

A few steps off is Norman Davis, an apiarist from near Swindon. This is only his second visit to the market, but he professes himself delighted with the "wonderful atmosphere". He is one of the few stall- holders who lives outside the county, but, as he says, he does "have bees coming into Gloucestershire". It is not just that they fly in, rather, he moves his 100-odd hives around to take advantage of seasonal crops.

Nobody talks up his wares more enthusiastically than Tony Free, who runs the Purely Organic trout farm. His fish live not in river water, which is often polluted, but in the output from a spring which gushes from 50 feet below ground and passes through his tanks at a rate of a million gallons a day. Non-organic trout, he says, are given antibiotics as fingerlings, which means that they take on water and, when cooked, tend to go mushy. His fish, in contrast, are stocked at only a third of non-organic rates and receive no antibiotics, so that they are healthier, firmer and more tasty.

Fine meat abounds, not least in the Frocester Fair stall run by Will Pinker and his wife, Nicki. Over the past 18 months the new market has helped the couple revolutionise their business. With traditional milk and pig production both in crisis, they closed down their dairy herd, built a licensed meat-cutting plant and borrowed a refrigerator from the village cricket club. In the early days of the market they sold from an old Coca-Cola fridge, with a couple of bottle coolers on the table. Now they have a smart chiller cabinet, and, at home, a farm shop. Like more and more farmers, they see that the best way forward is to localise sales.

Yet the star of the show is Robert Rees, an ebullient young freelance chef with a terrific gift of the gab who gives a cookery demonstration mid-morning. "This isn't being cheffy," he proclaims as he sorts his kit. "It's getting people to see how easy it is to cook good, local food."

Today, as always, he has arrived not knowing what he is to cook. The order turns out to be "a farmer's breakfast", so he combs other stalls for eggs, bacon, sausages, potatoes and bread, as well as trout, leeks and parsley for kedgeree. The moment he starts work, juggling pans on four gas rings, a crowd presses round, mesmerised by his dexterity, by irresistible smells and by his running commentary. In little over 20 minutes he creates an absolute feast, which he shares among the spectators. The kedgeree, and the "old-fashioned gypsy toast" fried with egg and cinnamon, are fit for gods.

The success of the market is largely due to Clare Gerbrands, who has lived in the town on and off for 15 years and now runs Made in Stroud, a shop which stocks the work of local artists and craftspeople. She gained experience of country markets in the early 1990s when she and her Dutch husband, Kardien, travelled around Tuscany, France and Spain with their children, living in a teepee and busking.

She started the farmers' market in July 1999, having heard that Stroud District Council was looking for somebody to run one. At first it took place once a month, then twice. Now between 40 and 50 stall holders pay pounds 20 each to attend. The events are still subsidised by the local authorities, but they are going so well that Clare hopes they will become self-financing about two years hence. She is now setting up a network of similar markets throughout Gloucestershire, and is about to start training courses for farmers to help them diversify and get the most out of their produce. But the most important effect of the enterprise has been to revive the heart of Stroud, which had been all but destroyed by the idiocy of planners in sanctioning three large supermarkets on the outskirts. Rows of empty shops give the centre a dead look, but signs of life are returning.

In England there are now 300 farmers' markets, and everywhere the message is getting through: that in food distribution, as in many other fields, small can be beautiful.

The next market will be held on Sat 3 Feb. Information: 01453 758060 or www.madeinstroud.org

Copyright 2001 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
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