Keeping It Local: A Suffolk Story

October 31, 2025·42 min·4 clips

Caroline Cranbrook's clipboard survey uncovered how small shops are the seedbeds for local food producers, challenging supermarket dominance.

A crisp autumn day starts it. Sheila Dillon walks through Aldborough Food and Drink Festival, past the stands, demos and masterclasses, then nudges the listener past the snacks. This is pleasure, yes, but it also has a job to do. The festival began 20 years ago with local landowners, farmers, campaigners and investors in food and farming, and it still carries that practical streak. Johnny Crickmore helps give the episode its spine. As Dillon presents it, buying food from nearby places matters after the festival tents come down. The Suffolk coast keeps making the point. Around Aldborough, small-scale fishing comes across as work, not heritage wallpaper: seasonal, careful, and tied to quality. Sprats get a wistful little chapter. A speaker remembers the east coast as an old centre of sprat fishing, with huge dinners and even sprat racing now gone. Then lobsters step in. Emma Whiteman introduces a fishing family with roots in the town for well over 200 years, with boats working from Lowestoft and the beach. The catch list is plain and appetising: Dover sole, lobsters, crabs, oysters, bass and skate, all shaped by season and quality more than volume. Buying local becomes a matter of knowing who caught what, from which boat, and to what standard. The community side feels lived in. Producers call in favours, lean on each other and meet brave new people making hot sauce or growing chilies. By the end, Dillon and producer Robin Markwell leave Suffolk food feeling like craft, work and belonging, with the sea and Snape marshes close by. The festival is still fun. It also sounds like one way to keep a local food economy alive.

As heard by us

A warm Suffolk food story where festival pleasure meets fishing families, local sourcing and community grit.

A crisp Suffolk food festival opens into something sturdier than a pleasant day out. Sheila Dillon visits the Aldborough Food and Drink Festival, where the Snape Maltings setting gives the episode a lived-in sense of place: farming, fishing, producers, seasonal buying and the…

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Why you'd press play

For a Suffolk food festival with enough local grit to make the jollity mean something.

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