30 May 2025
James Cameron and Deborah Heath take the family to Redbourn for this year’s celebration of local produce and agriculture…
The Hertfordshire County Show is an absolute institution. It has been running since 1879, starting life as a ploughing competition at Hatfield House (people had lower standards of entertainment before the invention of Netflix) before blooming into the full celebration of all things agricultural that it is today.
Things are always moving on, though, and there are now several, if not identical, then at least adjacent options for your summer weekends.
Last year we defected from the County Show to visit the Foodies Festival, and this year it returns to Oaklands alongside a Sausage and Cider festival and a Country Music day.
There is also the Chilli Festival at Bennington Lordship, the Great British Food Festival at Knebworth and the Welwyn Garden City World Food Festival, plus the various dates when St Peter’s Street is taken over by street food vans.
The County Show is about more than just food, of course, though we did try and sample as many different options as we could to ensure this side of it is fully covered. There are plenty of places to try, and if you settle for one of the multiple burger vans dotted around the site you are probably doing the show a disservice.
We had Soy & Ginger chicken wings, because everything is better with ginger, which had a rich umami sauce and just enough spice to keep things interesting.
There was Indian food, a good value raja box featuring a range of food of generally high quality though the ensemble was on the dry side due to a certain stinginess with the chutney and the naan was a little under-baked.
Finally we had a Malay rice bowl, excellent coconut rice topped with tender satay chicken and with a soft and yielding bao bun on the side.
Be prepared to eat sitting on the floor, though, as there are very few benches and these fill up quickly around lunch-time. We based ourselves by the Village Green stage, though, so were serenaded by Steve Young and his bluesy songs whilst we ate.
Admirably these were largely his own compositions rather than the more obviously crowd-pleasing route of doing covers, and it was a delightful spot to take lunch, pleasing to all your senses.
As well as food stalls there were a couple of tents featuring artisanal groceries. One of these was the ‘Made in Hertfordshire’ tent, filled with products from across the county, and it’s great to have an opportunity to support local businesses.
In fact, there are some items that we rely on these shows to stock up on, if only because we’re too cheap to pay for postage. Anyone who’s in the market for Moonshine will be spoilt for choice, as this seems to have taken over from artisanal gin as the ubiquitous spirit at these events.
A new addition in the last couple of years was a kitchen theatre tent, where chefs demonstrated their cooking in front of a crowd, and where hopefully you can grab a taste of it at the end. It was a nice place to sit down between charging around the site, and though I think it is unlikely that anyone was paying enough attention to recreate the full dish you might just pick up a useful hint here or there.
So far, so similar to the other food festivals out there.
Where the County Show distinguishes itself, though, is reminding you that all these food items need to actually come from somewhere.
It may not seem so when you spend your life on the Thameslink between St Albans and London, but Hertfordshire still has large amounts of land regularly producing food for us, and many families dedicating their lives to keeping us well fed.
Though it is only a few minutes away from the city centre, some areas of the showground can feel like a completely different world, a world where one is not properly dressed without a bowler hat and where horses are a regular topic of conversation.
There are a lot of horses at the County Show, and though I have seen them running many times I have never before appreciated what a joyful sight it is.
The sheer amount of knees in play seem to deny anatomy, but when there were a pair of jet black horses pulling an undertaker’s cart, their legs in complete synchronisation as they cantered along, it was poetry in motion.
On the more mechanical side there was the dancing forklifts, a mainstay of the festival for the last 15 years.
This features a number of farmers driving their JCBs at speed in close proximity to each other, and performing complex synchronised manoeuvres together.
Whilst it is undoubtedly a fun spectacle, there is a deeper message going on, about the farmers’ commitment to their job and howembedded they are in their local communities.
Events proceed across a number of arenas and stages, however the timetables provided seem more aspirational than prescriptive so you are best off just wandering around, catching the occasional snatches of guitar or dog training, and lingering when something takes your fancy.
There was a falconry display, as there is at most events and attractions across the land this summer, but my absolute highlight was the piglet racing.
This was rather shambolic, and I’m not sure the gambling syndicates will be very interested, but the sight of the organisers trying to convince eight disinterested but adorable pigs to go in a particular direction warmed the soul.
It did make it harder to stock up on scotch eggs afterwards, but this is the strange dichotomy in farming, at least to urban folk.
The farming community clearly care deeply for their animals, and it was lovely to see the children proudly parading their sheep or calves around the arena, but they also know that for them the animals are there to serve a purpose, and a purpose that often involves an early dispatch.
Obviously there are a wide range of opinions on this, and it caused some discomfort to the vegans in our party, but if you are a meat-eater then it has got to be better to appreciate where this meat is coming from, and to care about how the animals are treated before they become the filling for your burger, than to assume that they are produced by a magic chicken nugget machine.
We have been visiting the County Show for the last 15 years or so, and part of the joy is the continuity, the sense of familiarity that cannot grate due to the annual nature.
We still lament the absence of Mr Alexander’s Travelling Show, an eccentric fellow who would climb up towers of chairs and juggle knives in a way that became increasingly alarming as he aged, but as things drop out new things come along to take their place, and there are enough regulars to accept the odd tweak.
The show did seem a bit sparser this year, hopefully not the impact of the increased competition, and there was a lack of general lifestyle stalls. The toilet facilities have also been downgraded to festival style portaloos (unless you are lucky enough to make it into the member’s enclosure).
Despite this the County Show is a hardy perennial that will surely weather all the fads and fashions of the digital age, as it moves to the slower and deeper cycles of the land we all live on. Worst comes to the worst they can always bring back the ploughing contest.
