Our Bakery Blog

I’ve just been to my local food superstore (OK, it’s Sainsbury’s) to have a look at the bakery section, and I’ve come away with a sourdough loaf for £1.50. Two things strike me about this. First, the bread itself. It’s quite crusty, not overly so, and you get a few...

Just back from an expedition to Caslon Limited in St Albans, to have my Adana printing press serviced by the experts. I feel very lucky to have had the personal attention of Roy Caslon, a real enthusiast for letterpress printing, and to see the workshop where the...

The poem that accompanied this week’s bread is, of course, first and foremost a song, and as such it lives better in performance than on the page. And no performance, in my view, is better than Eddi Reader’s sublime interpretation — if you’ve never heard her sing...

This month’s poem, “Meeting and Passing”, is by one of the great American poets and one of my favourite poets of any nationality. It was first published in 1916, in Robert Frost’s third book, Mountain Interval, which is dedicated: “To You, who least need...

In the spring a middle-aged man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of how much bloody work there is to be done in the garden, as Tennyson so nearly wrote. OK, I know it’s not spring yet, officially — not until we’re at the equinox, whatever the Met Office argues. But...

7 February 2015. A note to the following, which was written last year: it is reported that Robert Green, who recreated Doves Type in a digital version, has now managed to locate some of the original sorts and recover them from their watery grave. Read the report here ...

This month’s poetry offering was of course chosen mainly by virtue of the fact that it contains the word ‘April’ in the first line.  I suppose I could just as well have opted for the start of The Waste Land, but The Canterbury Tales is a rather more locally rooted...

No apologies for this month’s poem being another by Edward Thomas – he is probably my favourite poet, after all, and one reason why my son is called Tom.  A week or so ago I realised that today – 24 June – is the centenary of his journey by train that stopped...

I’ve been rereading Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man this week and was surprised to realise that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of its publication. This, after all, was the bible of youthful rebellion in the Sixties, a central text for the soixante-huitards as well...

So there I was last week, driving up to Oxfordshire for the Towersey folk festival, when I remembered that I needed to stock up on a few basics. Happy as I am to shell out a fiver or more for an organic tofuburger, this gets expensive when extrapolated over an entire...

So, here’s the Hill Bakery’s new home, at the bottom of Grove Lane in Camberwell (dangerously handy for the Hermit’s Cave pub). As you can see, it’s still something of a building site, but behind those hoardings the windows now have their glass and the floor has been...