Stories from the Hop Yards brims with archive photos and films, alongside newly-recorded interviews. An essential ingredient of British beer, hops, with their evocative aroma, have been an integral part of Herefordshire life for centuries.
During the hand-picking heyday, families arrived for a working holiday by train, cattle lorry or charabanc. Dinners were cooked over open fires and children picked hops into old upturned umbrellas, while their mothers worked at the cribs. Pickers, farmers, traders and brewers come together in this to recount tales of hop-picking days, past and present, and with an eye to the future.
The film is part of the Herefordshire Life Through a Lens project, which explores the huge collection of photographs and negatives from Herefordshire photographer Derek Evans. Alongside digitising and exhibiting his archive, the project is creating an extensive selection of a over a 100 oral history videos from Herefordshire people, about the memories the photographs evoke. The archive consists of over 200,000 negatives, 790 exhibition images, hundreds of prints, scrapbooks full of newspaper cuttings, photo journals, and daily log books of the studio’s activities.
Watch the full film.
