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7 articles
They swapped city salaries for chicken coops, commuter trains for compost heaps, and rental flats for a few acres of West Country mud. Meet the young families who've made the leap to smallholding life — and are figuring out, one bruising season at a time, what self-sufficiency actually means.
When the shutters came down in 2020, nobody was entirely sure they'd go back up again. For hundreds of pubs, clubs, and small theatres across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset, the pandemic wasn't just a pause — it was a near-death experience. We spent time with the venue owners, musicians, and regulars who fought to keep live music alive in the South West, and found out what it really cost them.
Somewhere between a WhatsApp group and a barn door, a different kind of food economy is quietly flourishing across Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset. It's local, it's personal, and it exists largely outside the gaze of the supermarkets — and sometimes, the regulators too.
Deep in a Somerset village, a dormant bakehouse has been coaxed back to life by one determined baker who thinks the industrial loaf is one of the great quiet disasters of modern British life. She's not just baking bread — she's rebuilding a food culture, one slow ferment at a time.
Down on the Cornish coast, where the mornings smell of diesel and brine, one fisherman is quietly waging a personal war against the industrial tide. Mick Treloar still fishes the way his grandfather taught him — and he's determined to pass it on before the knowledge disappears entirely.
In a cluttered workshop on the edge of Dartmoor, Rob Trevithick is doing something almost nobody else in England still does — and doing it properly. We spent a morning with Devon's last working tinsmith to find out why a trade older than the Industrial Revolution is quietly finding its feet again.
Long before craft beverages became a marketing buzzword, the Hatchwell family of Somerset were pressing apples the way their great-great-grandparents taught them. We spent a morning in their orchard to find out how one family has quietly outlasted empires, supermarkets, and the rise of alcopops.