The History of Pimm's: Britain's Most Beloved Bottle of Summer
Picture the scene. It's around 1840, in the City of London. Not the gleaming glass-and-steel City of today, but the cobbled, fog-soaked, intensely smelly original — all counting houses, coffee shops, and the ever-present rumble of commerce. A man named James Pimm runs an oyster bar near the Bank of England. He's been there since 1823, when he arrived from Kent with shellfish, ambition, and a farmer's son's appetite for hard work. His customers are bankers, brokers, merchants, men in a hurry between transactions. And in a flash of genius that would echo through two hundred years of British summers, he starts serving them a drink.
Picnic Icons: The Village Fete
Paula Sutton of Hill House Vintage wrote something in Country Living recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. She was describing her Norfolk village fête — the bunting politics, the cake table, the judge who once borrowed a hedge trimmer from a competitor and will never fully escape that fact — and she ended with this:
“Everyone leaves slightly sunburnt or mildly damp and carrying a plant they hadn’t planned on buying.”
The Thermos Flask: How a Christmas Experiment Became Britain's Most Beloved Picnic Object
The history of the thermos in Britain begins in 1892 at the Royal Institution in London, where Sir James Dewar developed the first vacuum-insulated flask. Within decades, the vacuum flask moved from laboratory tool to household essential, becoming central to British picnic culture and outdoor tea traditions.
I want to tell you about a specific kind of sound.
It's the sound of a thermos being unscrewed in a cold car.
Picnic Icons: The Scotch Egg
Is there anything more quintessentially British than a Scotch egg? This golden, breadcrumb-coated delight is the very definition of a picnic staple — a portable, savoury snack steeped in tradition, bursting with flavour, and endlessly versatile. Whether nestled in a Fortnum & Mason hamper, gracing a gastropub menu, or tucked into a well-loved picnic blanket, the Scotch egg is nothing short of a national treasure.