Go Picking

Here’s a health to the company, and one to my lass,
Let us drink and be merry all out of one glass.
Let us drink and be merry, all grief to refrain
For we may or might never all meet here again.

– Words from the traditional Irish song, Here’s a Health to the Company

As autumn arrives, hedgerows and fields come into abundance; apples turn rosy, blackberries ripen, and hops begin to flower, signalling the start of harvest season. For Company Drinks, a social enterprise founded in 2014 by artist Kathrin Böhm from the artist collective Myvillages, picking is a celebration of what grows around us and a way of bringing people together and marking the season's turn. Inspired by the East End’s long tradition of picking holidays, Company Drinks invites local communities to gather, harvest fruit, share knowledge and turn the abundance of the local landscape into drinks enjoyed by the people of Dagenham and Barking who helped make them.

For over a hundred years, August and September would see families in east London and Essex set out for the fields or hop gardens of Kent to spend weeks picking hops and fruits. “They were sold as working holidays,” Kathrin explains, “and it was also a way to escape the East End and often cramped working conditions. It was an opportunity for temporary freedom.” The workers slept in small tin structures known as hopper’s huts; typically, women and children stayed during the week, and at the weekends men would travel from the city. These "working holidays" continued for generations and families returned year on year – meeting friends, picking apples, soft fruits and hops, and making themselves at home in the countryside for a few weeks.

It was not, however, all a rural idyll. When Kathrin founded Company Drinks, she wanted to ensure this history was not romanticised; she emphasises that it was “hard work, and ultimately underpaid seasonal labour.” Alongside the hard work, though, it was a deeply bonding experience, with people communing and singing as they picked. The 1972 documentary We Was All One, follows a group of former pickers, including a woman who describes it as being “just like a little community.” Another reflects, “I can’t afford a holiday – hopping was our holiday because we knew we were going to earn a few shillings to spend.” A picking holiday offered a chance to be outside and spend time with friends, while being paid. Once the harvest was complete, they would bundle onto the train to London until the following September, when they would return for another picking season.

As the mechanisation of hop and fruit picking came about in the 1950s, so too did the decline of these picking holidays. By the 1970s, the culture had all but died out as a practice, with only a few committed pickers making the journey out of London in the summertime. These community holidays became a memory, a past filled with fruits, laughter and friends.

Company Drinks initially set out to revive the hopping days and memories of the workers. In 2014, Company embarked on its first trip out of London to pick hops in Kent. Many of the people on this trip had done so as children, while for others, it was a completely novel experience. They now pick hops together every year – and have expanded to other fruits and plants that grow across Barking and Dagenham and the nearby countryside, including elderflower, apples and blackberries.

Nowadays, the picking community expands far and wide. Shaun Tuck, Co-Director and Head of Community Drinks, explains that “families who come to our picking trips have memories of going picking, and not just in the UK. It could be berries in Lithuania, or mangos in Jamaica.” Picking unites people from different walks of life, opening a door to conversation and collaboration, to sharing ideas, to imparting memories and bringing generations together. “It's about continuing this thread of connection between everyone and green spaces,” he says, “to find a deeper connection with others and also the nature around us.”

There is a universality to the act of picking fruit. It is available to us all, it’s free, and it encourages us to appreciate the natural world. Most of us know the feeling of picking the first blackberry of the season, or smelling an early elderflower blossom, or spotting a fig tree that has sprouted along a roadside. It is a moment of connection with nature, a pause for reflection and to mark the turning seasons.

Seema Manchanda, Co-Director together with Kathrin and Shaun, describes how the community picking days have evolved into what is now a detailed or better contemporary picture of London, its fruits and its communities: “We have quite a rich map of what grows where and who holds the knowledge, about the land, but also about plants, flowers, fruits.” This is the power of what Company Drinks has established: a space for a diverse group of people to gather together and share seasonal knowledge across generations. “It's really powerful to have a reason for the community to come together,” she says. “We like to build good company around nature, around harvest, around planting, around making drinks and food, and enjoying them together. It's more than back to basics. It's back to ourselves.”