Farming & markets

Another inspiring blog on Local Farmers & town market from Totnes....

The town’s Cattle Market meant the driving of animals into the town from the surrounding countryside. MF, who in August 1950 moved into the house her husband built on Barracks Hill, recalls needing to put a gate across their driveway in order to keep out the cattle who were driven into town by what was, at that time (before the town’s bypass was built) the main way to bring them to Totnes from Dartington.

Her son, AF, recalls picking up lots of casual work on local farms from the age of 13 onwards. He told me that in the late 1960s there were “lots of small family farms all over the place. The average farm size would have been 30-40 acres, 120 acres would have been considered quite upper class sort of farming”. Many of the farms were short of labour during the summer, especially during hay making and straw baling times. His favourite was one at East Allington. “We were out there a lot. We used to go out there and the farm was pretty much run by the young people.

How would this tale look for Frome? Does anyone have photos?

Mapping - can Frome feed itself?

From Geofutures in Bath - food footprints map for the SW - zoom in on Frome.

Read the comments on the Totnes study, and the final report from Transition Culture.

Shopping habits

Inspired by Rob Hopkins' Transition Culture blog on shopping, what was Frome like in the 50's & 60's?

From the blog, on Totnes;

MA remembers the shops until the mid-60s as being very different from today. “Everyone seemed to buy everything in the town, they didn’t go anywhere to buy it”. The idea, which began to emerge in the late 1960s, that shopping meant driving to another town, would have been baffling in the 40s and 50s. It is interesting also to get a sense of the extent to which the town’s shops reflected its position at the heart of a rural community, much more than it does at the moment, and how it was more of a working rural town than at present. AV recalls the High Street of his childhood.

“All of the little back streets had some kinds of artisans or builders yards or something going on in them. You didn’t have to go very far out of the High Street before you were in light industrial premises. All of the top of town, like Harris’s ironmongers, they had their big ironmongery shop, but on the other side they had, where Greenfibres is now, an agricultural machinery shop. Can you believe it?! There was agricultural machinery sitting there which was for sale! They sold harrows and seed drills and things to go on the back of tractors! They had a little showroom of all that sort of stuff. Then they had the blacksmiths forge just round the back there”.

Keyford area tythe map 1840

Old Frome

From the 1940's to the 1960's Frome, like many other market towns, was thriving. Most people did most of their shopping locally. This is a site where we can collect photos, stories and knowledge from those times to help us understand what life could be like in the future when our dependency on oil has to be drastically reduced.