Thousands of food lovers are expected to descend on a picturesque seaside village next weekend (May 12-13) for what promises to be a spectacular celebration of the region’s culinary heritage.
Tynemouth will be transformed into a foodie haven as more than 40 local producers gather alongside a host of celebrity North East chefs on May 12-13.
Former North East Chef of the Year David Kennedy will be one of the chefs demonstrating at the first Tynemouth Food Festival
The gastronomic extravaganza will also see a beer festival, Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, school cooking competitions and a host of other exciting gourmet activities springing up for the two day village-wide event.
Nine months in the planning, the first ever Tynemouth Food Festival has captured both the imagination of artisan producers and the public.
Stallholders signed up in record time for the free to attend festival centred round the village’s Queen Victoria Park and King’s School, with scores adding their name to a reserve list in the hope of securing a last minute pitch.
And a three-night pop-up restaurant between May 9-11 organised as an appetizer to the main course by former North East Chef of the Year David Kennedy, sold out within a matter of days.
Places were limited to 80 diners a night at David K @ Café K at King’s School. But such was the interest in the pop-up showcasing the seasonal, locally sourced menu on offer at David Kennedy’s acclaimed Food Social restaurant in Newcastle that extra tickets have had to be issued.
Regional chefs – including Graeme Cuthell of Irvins on North Shields Fish Quay; MasterChef: The Professionals finalist John Calton of the Harbour Lights, South Shields; Kevin Mulraney of Tynemouth’s Grand Hotel; Mary Wilkins of the New Exchange Brasserie and Bar in North Shields, and Simon Walsh of Close House Hotel’s No 19 restaurant in Northumberland – have also given their time for free to host two days of cookery demonstrations in regional food group Taste North East’s state of the art mobile kitchen.
Ann Cudworth of Dough Works
Organised by the Tynemouth Business Forum with the support of the Co-operative Membership, North Tyneside Council, fish and chip shop supplier Henry Colbeck and village businesses Fezziwigs, Priory Art, Brannen and Partners and King’s School, it had originally been intended to hold a simple farmers’ market.
But residents and businesses have been queuing up to ensure the inaugural Tynemouth Food Festival is a true celebration of the finest produce and culinary talent on offer anywhere in the UK.
Sally Craigen, chairman of both the Tynemouth Business Forum and the food festival committee, said: “The event has captured everyone’s imagination and from small beginnings has swelled into a truly village wide affair with residents and businesses and young and old alike all joining forces to pay homage to this region’s superb home grown and home produced food and drink.
“We have been bowled over by the response. It is fair to say that at the beginning we never envisaged anything as spectacular as the weekend we now have planned.
“But, once word got out it seemed to take wings.
“We have gone from a glorified farmers’ market to a two day foodie feast with more than 40 stallholders and the added attractions of the chef demos, a week long beer festival taking place in the village’s Cumberland Arms pub, David Kennedy’s pop-up restaurant, a school cake decorating competition, a Junior MasterChef-style contest organised by the Grand Hotel, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and a host of other activities from cocktail making sessions to wine tastings.
“But it shows the support there is out there for local food and drink producers.
“Our aim has always been to encourage people to support local, put their money back into the regional economy and discover what a fantastic place Tynemouth and this part of the North East coast is.
“The first Tynemouth Food Festival promises to be a fabulous weekend of gastronomic delights for all and we look forward to welcoming as many people as possible to the village.”
Among the producers taking part are the Northumberland Cheese Company, Doddington Dairy, the Glass Slipper Bakery, Riley’s Fish Shack, Kenspeckle Confectionary and Moorhouse Farm.
Some, like butchers TR Johnson from Wooler and Tynemouth’s Deli Around the Corner, are attending their first ever food festival.
Meanwhile, the Cumberland Arms’ Beer Festival will feature around 50 seasonal real ales – many of them never before seen in the North East.
David Irving at The Cumberland Arms
They will join popular local names like Mordue and the Allendale Brewery in the week-long celebration of the ‘noble hop’ running between May10-17.
Landlord David Irving said: “We’re going to feature a variety of seasonal beers for the festival. Some of these are only available for three or four weeks of the year and many will never have been seen in the North East before.
“I wanted to create something special to mark the first Tynemouth Food Festival, and with the broad selection of beers and real ales we will have on offer, I believe it will be a memorable occasion. After all, real ale and high quality food go hand-in-hand.”
- Tynemouth Food Festival is free to attend and will take place on May 12-13 between 9am-4pm at locations across the village. For more information and to keep up-to-date with all the latest news go to www.tynemouthfoodfestival.co.uk or www.facebook.com/tynemouthfoodfestival
Media Enquiries
For more information, photos or to arrange interviews please call Jane Hall of Smart Cookie Media on 07880 923 507
Filed under: Events in the North East, food, Newcastle, shopping, travel & tourism, Tynemouth | Leave a Comment
Tags: Beer festival, David Irving, Junior MasterChef, North East, North Shields, North Tyneside, Queen Victoria Park, Tynemouth
I have to hold my hands up and say before I start that I absolutely adore Germaine Greer and, when she told the audience at The Sage that she had a ‘nutters and stalkers’ pile in her office into which she sorts her post, I wondered if I had ever graced it. It was after she published her book The Whole Woman in 1999 that I realised the extent of my admiration. The book blew me so far away that I wrote Professor Greer a letter, a letter of abject adoration. This woman seriously rocks my world (and she wrote back *swoon*).
Sunday night’s lecture at The Sage dealt with the furore over Samantha (and yes Professor Greer, I will forever say that name with an Australian accent and think of your cat) Brick’s recent dressing down at the hands of the media (Hadley Freeman – another hero – excepted), the site of a gaggle of plucked pheasants (women in fascinators) at The Grand National and why it would be a great thing for women to stop despising each other quite so much (it saps our energy and gives yet more power to our oppressors).
She talked about David Beckham’s tattoos, about the beauty of Etonian students and about her dodgy knee (and about Pamela Stephenson’s perfect kneecaps)
And she made such sense. Such clear and perfect sense.
Education, motherhood, what to wear if you aren’t what the high street deems to be a womanly shape (where woman means without hips, bust or – heaven forbid – stomach).
She was thought provoking, hilarious, passionate and warm.
Greer puts into words the feelings I get when things don’t quite seem fair, when my emotions cloud what I want to say – and she encourages saying what you want to say – a lot.
Where are the women’s voices in the pub? Where are the women’s voices on TV (as Kira Cochrane discovered recently they are pretty hard to find).
Professor Greer has a voice. And it’s a bloody good one – and it was brilliant to hear it in real life.
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When you are seven it is a big job to get your babies to go to sleep. Especially if Wol is nocturnal and the lambs keep fighting. The secret is a neat line, a comfy blanket – and giving them most of your bed.
Gina Ford would approve.
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Tags: babies, Sleep
Priory at Dusk
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Tags: English Heritage, Tynemouth
Daniel’s arm at Pizza Express
Inspired
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Tags: inspiration, tattoos
Scott’s Arm @ Lui’s
Just awesome
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Tags: tattoos, Tynemouth
Shape your world, build your city at this great research project by Newcastle University
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What links the roof of Northern Stage, the car park at Four Lane Ends at the words NO NO NO NO NO?
Cath Campbell
Ideal Mexico
If you know Newcastle you already know the work of Cath Campbell.
And we said nothing, all the day
Escapology crowns the Northern Stage building, Detour at Four Lane Ends animates the façade of the multi-storey car park and, in collaboration with Miles Thurlow, she asks us to question the world around us with the work No No No No No, that graces five archways of the railway viaduct next to the Tyne Bridge.
Yes. That’s Cath Campbell.
A member of the Contemporary Art Society Campbell ‘makes sculpture, drawing and large scale architectural interventions, which attempt to reinvent our associations with the built environment.’
Her first solo exhibition Ideal Mexico has just opened at The Workplace Gallery in Gateshead. The gallery, housed in The Old Post Office, is a listed 19th Century red brick building with high ceilings and twisting staircases. Room after room is filled with Campbell’s work and the questions she poses about the ubiquity of the up market lifestyle offered to us by travel and lifestyle guides.
Untitled
On the opening night of her exhibition Campbell explained why the creation of the delicate collages Hotel Series was the springboard for the exhibition:
“I was looking through travel guides of hotels in cities all across the world and I noticed that the same colour schemes had been used in the interior design of every one. It struck me as interesting – and slightly odd. That’s where it started …”
On first glance the collages look like tiny constellations of stars. Tilt your head and you can almost make out Orion’s Belt in one, The Plough in another. But the meaning of the series lies beneath its shapes. Each dot of colour is placed on white paper in the same layout as the original photograph and in each case Campbell has only selected one blue, one yellow, two browns, and a black. The titles of the works, The Skylofts, MGM, Las Vegas, 2012, Superior Room, Melrose Arch Hotel, Johannesburg, 2012, Suite 105, Art Hotel Corona D’oro, Bologna, 2012 hint at cities filled with exoticism and glamour and yet the places a visitor might stay in are essentially as uniform the world over as a fast food restaurant.
In stark contrast to these delicate collages Campbell has created a series of dramatically enlarged found images which have been UV printed onto powder coated aluminium; titled For I have known them all already, known them all # 1-6.
For I have known them all already, known them all #1-6
The images, which hang in the first room of the gallery, draw the eye like a series of giant Polaroid pictures, their crisp white borders like the edges of some giant glossy travel guide or magazine clarified and highlighted by the removal of the majority of each of the images. The colours that remain create abstract shapes and suggestions of form.
“Cutting away the photograph like that made the work more architectural. I know what was there – but someone seeing it now doesn’t know – although they might feel that the space is ‘familiar’. The size means that the pixels of the original image have been blurred and made more abstract. The light seems watery… and I was interested in that – in the painterly margin that was left behind.”
The work And we said nothing, all the day is displayed in the same room and takes its title from John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy. A series of high gloss photographs taken of photographs and stacked along a narrow shelf And we said nothing, all the day began life on Campbell’s dining room table:
“It’s about appropriating the images, presenting them as my own. You can see the shadows I threw across the surface as I photographed them, see the glare where the flash has bounced back off the page.”
By photographing images published in travel guides Campbell not only appropriates the idea of the location as a place to aspire to visit, she appropriates the work of the travel photographer who, by definition, takes more than a mere snapshot of a destination. It’s as if she has returned from a global trip armed with a collection of holiday photographs that other people would actually want to see – shadows, reflections, glare and all.
And we said nothing, all the day
Alongside these photographic works, Campbell presents a series of new sculptures. A cable car is recreated and presented in stunning detail, a tiny flight of stairs made of cast metal stands seemingly suspended in thin air, a lighthouse, set in the middle of one of the upstairs rooms, dominates the space despite its diminutive size.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse, detail
The gallery guide to Campbell’s exhibition says:
“ ‘Ideal Mexico, a chance but fitting title taken from the model name of the old central heating boilers in the gallery building, invites us to question the relationship between reality, desire, and experience; challenging the superficiality and formality of our insatiable appetite for images depicting and describing how our lives could be in an ideal world.”
Explaining the idea behind Hotel Series takes time and requires layers of understanding. Finding sufficient words to describe For I have known them all already, known them all # 1-6 is hard. This exhibition works on many levels, it plays with our understanding and our interpretation of the world we live in. It makes us think and it makes us question ourselves and our beliefs about our aspirations – and that is always a good thing.
Go – and give your mind a workout.
Ideal Mexico: 11th February – 17th March 2012
Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm (Or by appointment)
Cath Campbell was born in 1972 in Ilkeston, UK. She lives and works in Newcastle, UK.
Workplace Gallery was founded in 2005 by artists Paul Moss and Miles Thurlow. Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs. Workplace Gallery is currently at The Old Post Office, Gateshead; a listed 19th Century red brick building built upon the site where the important British artist, engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) lived and died.
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C’mon, C’mon Get Happy!
POP-UP CINEMA TO BRING GLOBAL ‘HAPPY’ EVENT TO THE NORTH EAST
Centre for Life, Newcastle
A merry band of happiness promoters is bringing the documentary film, ‘Happy‘, by Oscar nominated Director Roko Belic, to the North East. It will be screened for one day only at a ‘pop-up cinema’ at the Centre for Life in Newcastle on World Happiness Day, February 11th.
On the same day the film will be enjoyed in communities across the globe, from Sao Paulo to Singapore as people celebrate what it means to be happy, who is happiest and how we can contribute to the happiness of others.
World Happy Day
Despite the credentials of the Director, the film does not currently have a distribution deal through cinemas and can only be seen at special screenings like this one. It is being hosted by a small group of North East based supporters of happiness, wellbeing and positive psychology who hope it will inspire viewers to join them in a new movement to promote happiness in the region.
Featuring real-life people and stories, the film brings to life the findings of research into well-being and happiness and shows us that good family, social and community relationships, rather than wealth and status, are what really make us happy. We see the story of a beautiful woman named Melissa Moody, a mother of three who had a “perfect life” until the day she was run over by a truck. Disabled for nine years and disfigured for life, amazingly she is happier now than before her accident. Manoj Singh, a rickshaw puller from the slums of Kolkata, India who lives in a hut made of plastic bags with his family, is found to be as happy as the average American.
Children in India
While making the film Roko Belic learned a lot about the nature of happiness and what is important in life. In an article in The Huffington Post Belic said [1]:
“I learned something simple but completely illuminating. Research showed that just about all happy people have strong relationships. They are healthier and have happier children. They are more likely to find a creative solution to a problem and to help a stranger in need. Happy people have fewer conflicts and are less likely to commit crimes, pollute the environment or go to war. In other words, just about everything I cared about, everything I wished I could change in the world, was improved with being happy.”
Children from Denmark co-housing community
“The greatest lesson I learned while making this film is that my pursuit of happiness is not about me. It’s about our relationships and how we help each other. It’s about us.”
Bushman
Paul Hemphill, one of the organizers of the Centre for Life screening said:
“Our event will be so much more than a typical cinema screening. The doors will open an hour beforehand for the chance to chat and make new friends over a drink. And then afterwards, for those who want to stay, there will be time to discuss the film with a panel of local experts. We hope that the whole event will be an incredibly rewarding and potentially life changing experience for everyone who attends.
Local business owners Mike Cockburn (Sogno), Paul Hemphill (Horizons Life Coaching), Jan Etoile (Etoile Enterprises), Justin Souter (Souter Consulting), and Emily Sweetman (Emily Sweetman Limited) are the organisers of the event. Each of them has an interest in coaching, personal development, training, wellbeing and organisational improvement.
Screenings take place at 3pm (Doors open 2pm) or 7.30pm (Doors open 6:30pm) at Centre for Life conference centre, Newcastle on Saturday 11 February 2012. Tickets cost £10 or £7.50 (concessions).
Life Conference and Banqueting Centre
Matinee tickets are available from http://happynortheastmatinee.eventbrite.com and evening tickets from http://happynortheastevening.eventbrite.com
More information can be found at: http://www.worldhappyday.com
Filed under: Events in the North East, film making, Newcastle, travel & tourism | Leave a Comment
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Katherine Wildman
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Recent Entries
- Tynemouth Village Food Festival Will Give a True Taste of the North
- 40 Years of Feminism and Fun – Germaine Greer at The Sage
- How to Get Your Babies To Go To Sleep
- Priory at Dusk
- Daniel’s arm at Pizza Express
- Scott’s Arm @ Lui’s
- The Great North Build at the Hancock Museum
- Coast magazine | The Lobster Shack
- What links the roof of Northern Stage, the car park at Four Lane Ends at the words NO NO NO NO NO?
- C’mon, C’mon Get Happy!
- My Naughty Little Sister & Burglar Bill or ‘How Housework Made Me Feel Young Again’
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