02 Jun 2026
James Cameron and Deborah Heath return to Redbourn for this year’s celebration of local produce and agriculture
Like all outdoor events in this country your Hertfordshire County Show experience will be heavily impacted by the weather. Last year the weekend was overcast, always threatening to spill over into rain but never quite getting there.
It meant you didn’t particularly want to sit still for too long or you might start to get chilly, but other than that perfectly good walking around weather.
This year, on the other hand, was hotter than a Tabasco contact lens solution. Now there were obviously winners and losers to this. The coffee stands that usually had long and snaking queues in the morning were fairly quiet, whereas the frozen yoghurt and smoothie stand became the center of the show.
Whereas in previous years any shelter from the rain would be jealously fought over now it was shade that became the most valuable commodity.
There were also little baths of water, but I assumed these were only for dogs to cool down in, and I would have drawn disapproving tuts if I had jumped in. As they say, though, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, and I was happily decked out in shorts and a hat and ready to party.
Something which is either a new development or else something I just have never noticed before is the shuttle bus that runs throughout the day to and from the station, and this is an absolute game changer.
It meant I could enjoy the various bars at the show, rather than very definitely not enjoying the car park and queueing system. A cold pint of beer was quite the ticket on a day like today.
It was also a rare opportunity to go through town on a double decker, which offers a whole new perspective on proceedings.
There are two ways to approach a festival, and the Country Show is essentially a festival, albeit with more rare breed sheep than most. One is to go through the programme with a highlighter, working out what you want to see and calculating travelling times between stages. That is not the strategy when the sun is beating down on you relentlessly, though, especially given the relaxed approach to timings that they have every year here.
Much better by far to amble aimlessly around the place, seeing what tickles your fancy and moving at a pace less likely to leave you a sweaty mess. Taking this approach we stumbled across a number of small delights. There was some lovely acoustic music on the Village Green stage from a relaxed Here’s Kieran and a more upbeat Amber Lilly, and some very friendly donkeys.
There was also what I think was another new addition, a tent proudly showing off the winning entries in an impressively large range of arts and crafts categories. There were some mouthwatering baked goods, although having that many cakes on display and not letting you eat them comes close to entrapment. There were also some heartwarming art pieces, including best picture from a handprint and best Lego tractor. This tent was very definitely my Best in Show.
It was also nice to hang out at the Jubilee Arena, the Pyramid Stage of the County Show. Here we were treated to such headliners as some horses, and some slightly larger horses. Very welcome was David the Shepherd, whose calming commands were obviously designed to encourage his dogs to move his sheep to a small pen, but also formed a very pleasing backdrop to a revitalising drink.
Next on the agenda was the Hertfordshire Zoo Mascot race. We had envisaged this as a chance to finally decide who is faster, a ring-tailed lemur or a capybara. To be fair, if we’d thought through the logistics of this we would have realised it was fairly unlikely, and instead it was a running race between a group of human people dressed as giant animals, still quite impressive given the prevailing conditions. For the sports fans out there, it was easily won by the pre-race favourite, the reindeer.
For those wanting actual animal racing there was the ever adorable piglet racing. Not quite racing, but there was also a display from some handsome Heavy Horses with their accompanying carts. This was billed as a Musical Spectacular, which meant they drove around the ring whilst music played. Disappointingly, none of the horses danced. This was part of a celebration of the 140th anniversary of the show, a slightly odd milestone to note but I suppose when you reach that age you celebrate all you can.
As well as the animals, people dressed as animals and people telling animals what to do, one of the appeals of the show are the various shopping marquees. This is a chance to stock up on local fripperies and take advantage of the way your mental price index goes absolutely out of whack for some reason (in what other situation would you happily spend £20 on fudge?).
This area seemed slightly diminished this year, though. Some regular favourites were missing, which does lead me to worry about their health in the current economic climate. There also seemed less tents than previously, with everything slightly more spaced out to cover it up. One of my favourite parts of the show is taking an artfully arranged photo of all the indulgent foodstuffs we come home with, and this year it just would have been a bit pitiful.
It does give you a chance to see what the latest trends are in impulse dining purchases, which this year seems to be very large cookies. It also seems that crumble vans are now a thing, although they were unsurprisingly not doing a roaring trade that day. There were also many tempting options for in-show dining. As my kids are currently rewatching ‘The Bear’ I could not resist going for one of Original Joe’s ‘Chicago’s Original Chicago (style) Italian Beef Dipped Italian Beef Sandwiches’, and I would recommend any reader who sees Original Joe out and about to do the same as it was a blast.
A doughy soft sub roll was filled with plentiful beef, then dipped in the stock, before being covered in spicy pickles. There was also a bunch of cheese in there too. The beef was rich in flavour, and the pickles blew your mouth away but best of all was when the doughy roll got all soggy from the stock. Next year I might just head to the Illinois State Fair if all their sandwiches are this good.
By the time we came to catch the bus back home we were slightly wilted, slightly burned (though not as much as some of the poor souls we saw who took the typical British minimalist approach to skin protection), but very happy. Whilst we weren’t as loaded down with cheese and sausages as in previous years we had drunk lovely beer in the sun, eaten lovely sandwiches and watched a man tell some dogs to move some sheep to a different part of a field. If that’s not a winning start to a Bank Holiday Weekend, I don’t know what is.
