The first Jam Yesterday, Jam Tomorrow Art Picnic on 20th July was led by Sasa Marinkov at the Model Market Garden in Marble Hill Park. Fifty people from the Ethnic Minority Advocacy Group UK (EMAG) came to make art and enjoy fresh air and food.

“Before rugby there was jam!” was the tag-line of our Twickenham Heritage Walk on 1 July, taking in Poupart’s jam factory in Third Cross Road and Marsh Farm. Twickenham was known especially for orchards and soft fruit. Making jam is a traditional way of preserving the fruit that cannot be consumed immediately, especially useful in an era before electric power and efficient refrigeration.

The "Feeding London" exhibition was the setting for a lively and varied education session run by Ed Bartram (pictured below) , Education Officer of Jam Yesterday, Jam Tomorrow, for ten children from Hounslow Heath Junior school. The exhibition brings the past to life and the children joined in the remodelling of market garden history by making a basket of carnations.

Heritage Horticulture Session at the Model Market Garden in Marble Hill Park for people with learning disabilities.

We had three great sessions at the Model Market Garden for Learning Disabilities Awareness Week in June. While showing participants around the garden, I explained some of the history of market gardens in the Twickenham area. We looked at the vegetables growing in the demonstration plot and in the Dig for Victory plot, and tried some of the peas fresh from the pods, including the local variety ‘Feltham First’.

£8 may seem like a modest amount but it is a very important symbol. It is the donations to the Model Market Garden in Marble Hill Park from members of the public who value our produce and flowers, on our first day of setting out the stall. We need to raise funds for the long term future of the garden and produce will be an important aspect of sustainability. Great thanks to the volunteers who grow, tend and harvest the produce and to the local community for supporting our project.

Come and visit our produce table at the Model Market Garden in Marble Hill Park on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from Tuesday 16th June. The plants and vegetables we are growing at Marble Hill are heritage varieties that would have been common in the local market gardens 150 years ago. Some have a very interesting history. There will be suggested donations and any money we raise will go towards ensuring the future of the garden.

Tomb of Thomas Pears, who lost his life on the S S Titanic.

FAMILY ARTS AND CRAFTS WORKSHOP

To complement the new Jam Yesterday, Jam Tomorrow exhibition ‘Feeding London: the forgotten market gardens’ at the Museum of Richmond, in the next family workshops run by the Museum we will be learning about market gardens, tracing the growth, peak and decline of the productions of fruit, vegetables and flowers in the area. To get creative we will be looking at the depiction of fruit and vegetables in art and take a stroll to our nearest green grocer to look first hand at a variety of fruit and vegetables.

Teddington in the mid-nineteenth century was: “A simple country village… well beyond the smoke and confusion of the great city, ‘as rural as anything between Hyde Park and Bristol.’ One shop supplied the needs of the few people, and the life of the village centred about the quiet country vicarage set in its garden of flowers.” Now buzzing with traffic and home to more than 10,000 people, both short and long-term residents, the present has largely overlaid the past and we need a guide to understand the place we see today.

The exhibition “Feeding London - the forgotten market gardens of South West London” opened for a private view at the Museum of Richmond last week. The exhibition is open to the public during Museum opening hours until 1st September.

Private view guests of the Environment Trust’s Jam Yesterday, Jam Tomorrow project and of the Museum included volunteers, staff and consultants, funders, project partners and oral history interviewees.