The summer Season
Lifting the lid on a sturdy hamper to find cold ham and ginger beer is a summer joy. Julie Harding meets the wicker weavers who make the dream come true
NO one puts on a picnic with quite as much panache as Ratty. The cold chicken Kenneth Grahame’s affable and generous water vole brings to the little blue-and-white boat, alongside ‘cold tongue cold ham cold beef pickled gherkins salad French rolls cress sandwiches potted meat ginger beer lemonade soda water’ has companion Mole ‘in ecstasies. “This is too much!”’ However, beyond the extravagances of this particular feast in The Wind in the Willows, what also sets it apart is the ‘fat wicker luncheon-basket’ in which the edibles are encased. How much more beguiling surely than the ‘parcel’ protecting the sandwiches that Mr Ramsay opens and shares in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or even the undisclosed paraphernalia at that most famous of literary picnics, in Emma on that ‘very fine day’ at Box Hill, during which Jane Austen chooses to explore the tense interplay between her fractious characters rather than depict wicker baskets.
If the great novelist had deigned to illustrate a pannier, it could conceivably have been a model by G. W. Scott, which had set up its fine wickerwork business in London in 1661. G. W.
Scott is credited as being the inventor of the compartmentalised picnic basket we know and love today, having unveiled it at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Yet a little over a century later, with the Victorian glory days for picnicking long gone and demand for alfresco dining accessories in terminal decline, the company closed its doors, seemingly forever.
A few years ago, picnic baskets, and the eyewatering sums antique versions garnered at auction, piqued the interest of menswear design graduate Stuart Eggleton, who envisaged a renaissance for G. W. Scott. ‘I revived the company after visiting various archives —which included order books that dated back to 1670—as I thought it was an interesting story,’ says Mr Eggleton, who now sells luxury Morning Baskets and the slightly larger bestselling Afternoon Basket cousins (as well as Alcohol Baskets), under the G. W. Scott label mainly to clients in the UK, who take them to polo games, tennis matches, Glyndebourne and Henley Regatta. Strong arms are required to transport them to the actual dining spot, however, as they are heftier than cheaper imitations, having been crafted from Somerset willow and leather and filled with cutlery fashioned in Sheffield and fine bone-china tea sets made by Royal Warrant holder Caverswall in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
‘Our picnic baskets are more like cases and are inspired by the
