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Oct 16, 2024

Don’t hop me now: London’s lost summer harvest holiday - BBC

“The generation of today will never come like we have.” Every September for decades, entire families - including grandparents, babies, and pets - would begin a mass exodus from the East End of London

“The generation of today will never come like we have.”

Every September for decades, entire families - including grandparents, babies, and pets - would begin a mass exodus from the East End of London to Kent for their hop-picking summer holidays, external.

By 1972, the tradition was dying out and the BBC magazine programme Nationwide followed some of the last hop-pickers as they made their way from London to the farm where they had been harvesting every autumn for more than 50 years.

Kate Davis and her friends returned to the same hoppers’ huts they had used for decades. It was an annual migration to the Maidstone area that they feared would die out with them.

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1972: Nationwide meets some traditional hop-pickers returning to Kent

“What I particularly liked was coming down the hop fields and meeting all my old friends and all new neighbours,” said Kate.

“We were one homely happy family.”

People would pack their ‘hopping boxes’ weeks in advance; trunks filled with food and clothes to last the time they would spend away.

Thousands came by horse and cart, while special trains departed from London Bridge station to bring even more people to the hop farms of the south-east of England. Many viewed it as a holiday, external and a way to escape the city.

Once a common sight in Kent, external, hop gardens are now few and far between.

The green, cone-shaped flowers have famously been used for centuries to brew beer. They were planted in the spring and trained up onto a system of strings that could be up to six metres high.

This work was done by hand, by men walking on stilts between the rows of poles holding them aloft.

Harvesting the flowers was highly labour-intensive and required more workers than lived locally. The long vines were pulled down and the flowers stripped by hand into large bins. Each picker was paid by the bushel.

After picking, the hops were dried in an oast house before they could be used for brewing.

Oast houses, with the distinctive cowls on the roofs, became associated with the county of Kent. Many that remain have since been converted into houses.

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1948: Newsreel follows London families taking their annual working holiday, hop picking in Kent

In September 1948, when the tradition was still in full bloom, BBC Newsreel followed many of the people as they departed on the Hop Pickers’ Special train from London Bridge.

Hundreds of workers scrambled aboard, bringing their children with them. The kids would play amongst the rows of towering vines while the older people stripped the plants bare.

From their parents, the children would learn the knack of picking the flowers and throwing them into bins.

Meals were cooked in the open, helping to foster a sense of community among the people who came back year after year.

The Salvation Army came as well, to help look after children and to show slides on a screen they erected on Sunday evenings.

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Authors George Orwell and W. Somerset Maugham were both inspired to write about this annual harvest.

In his semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, Maugham described the scene: “They were all hard at work, talking and laughing as they picked. They sat on chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their baskets by their sides, and some stood by the bin throwing the hops they picked straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a good many babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked up in a rug on the soft brown dry earth. The children picked a little and played a great deal.”

Orwell was not quite as enchanted. As a writer, he wanted to “get right down among the oppressed” and spent time living among the poor and working classes in Paris and England, publishing several essays and novels about his experiences. In 1931, he disguised himself to go hop-picking, external.

He described it in his diaries: “It wasn’t a bad life, but what with standing all day, sleeping rough and getting my hands cut to bits, I felt a wreck at the end of it. It was humiliating to see that most of the people there looked on it as a holiday – in fact, it is because hopping is regarded as a holiday that pickers will take such starvation wages.”

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2014: A look at the historic hop-picking machine

It was not to be a Londoner’s summer holiday forever.

In the 1960s, industrial hop-picking machinery began to replace the manual labour of the workers, leading to the decline and the eventual end of the hop-picking holiday once and for all.

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