My earliest memories are full of the voices of women, telling me things. I did not want to hear all of it, but thanks to women, I can cook. Their kitchen secrets, handed down, were at the heart of good suppers then – and they still are. I continue to collect more and more of them. I can’t resist the opportunity to ask, “How did you do that?” when I taste something good.

At its best, feminine cookery is heroic, creative, practical and above all, nurturing. Nurture is a deal, an agreement that can be a real struggle to keep up – especially when there is a ready-meal industry there to take care of it for you, for better or for worse. Stepping into the kitchen raises a number of dilemmas. Often the need to cook is just a matter of answering hunger with whatever can be bought with ease on the way home from work, and prepared quickly. For many, it is about pleasing children while nourishing them, too. Others want to cook something special for guests without drama, and some need to learn to cook to save money – younger aspirational cooks, for example.

It isn’t that I wish to promote some sort of Fifties kitchen deity, a martyred oven slave whose reputation lives and dies by the lightness of her sponges. The truth is, women are opting out of cooking completely. Some reason that the fight for equality in jobs and pay had to have its victims, and home cooking has been one of them. But cooking has to go on if we are to deal with both the rising rate of obesity and the wider social problems related to poor eating habits.

Now that the mothers’ voices are silent, creating a generation of kitchen “orphans”, it is left to the potent influence of television to provide that all-important food education. And, with television cookery dominated by male chefs, feminine cookery is in danger of disappearing from the mainstream. The few women given prime time by the broadcasters must play the role of pouting goddess or headmistress demanding obedience rather than practical mother cook. Stereotypical male traits characterise the chef shows; we watch generals in command, not home cooks in action.

If the chaps are not out there hunter gathering or demonstrating extraordinary technical prowess with a pig’s extremities, they are going head to head in gladiatorial combat in contests where the weakest have no chance of survival. It is cooking for show, not showing how to cook, and sometimes it is just bullying, dressed up as fun.

Knowing what it is like to manage a full-time job, children and a small budget is something a celebrity can only pretend to understand. But cookery shows are about entertainment: nurturing cookery is a reality show too far perhaps. Too simple, too modest, far too unexpecting of applause – yet to me, feminine food is the finest you can eat, whether at home or out in those restaurants where it finds a marginal place.

The profile of cookery and food has soared thanks to television, but amazingly this still fails to get people cooking. We are better at eating out, standards in catering have risen. A 2008 government report showed that since 1998 – that is, during the decade when television became obsessed with food – sales of convenience food had risen by 300 per cent. The number of people who aspire to cook has doubled, however; but mostly – and not surprisingly – this is only the occasional showpiece meal. Traditional home cookery remains in decline.

In the end, no matter how many schools adopt cookery as a subject as a result of high-profile television campaigns, it is home influence that changes everything. It may be as easy for a woman to rise to the top in her profession as a man, but supper is usually her responsibility, whether she decides to cook it herself or not. Feminism has not changed everything: 70 per cent of women in work have dependent children and more children have women as their main carers than they do men.

Kitchenella was inspired by a meeting with a Greek chef, who passed on to me his mother’s advice about cooking perfect aubergines. I had just eaten this extraordinary dish of non-greasy aubergines cooked with tomato, goat butter and mint at his taverna in Crete, and I asked how it was done. The technique had survived generations, yet no one had written it down. It occurred to me that there must be thousands of secrets, floating in the ether, which are now not finding an ear – if her son had not wanted to become a cook, would this secret have been lost forever?

I wanted to turn that frequency back on and record all the most useful things I have learnt, and put the feminine voice into one book – a sort of mother for kitchen orphans, if you like. Recipes and ideas from people I love and trust: my mother, sisters, aunts, cousins and friends; recipes from historical figures I’ve studied that fit perfectly into the mother cook type, and also recipes from honorary mothers – the men whose cooking often imitates the most delicious feminine food – people such as Nigel Slater, Mark Hix and Jeremy Lee. Then there are those people like my Greek mentor above. You may meet them fleetingly, but you’ll never regret asking the essential question: “How?”

Nurturing cookery is the opposite of “cheffy” food. It is imaginative, but it is simple. The need to cook comes around so often that ways are found to make it quick and easy. It combines generosity with an eye on the budget, and there is a fail-safe element, too, essential in many homes where uneaten food is financially disastrous. It has to fit in with life, and must include ingredients that are not too difficult to buy.

Ultimately there is the battle of how not to become bored of cooking: not to see it as a chore. I myself find it hard to maintain enthusiasm, and it is my job to cook. The cure is creativity. Hilda Leyel, an early 20th-century food writer and herbalist, called cooking “the gentle art”. With a good basic recipe, like a tomato sauce cooked until it is sweet, you can make at least a dozen other things. Once you know the way to make a simple beef stew, there are eight different ways to make it more interesting. You only need to have one dough recipe to be a baker, or learn one simple terrine method to be your own charcuterie. When you find something that works, repeat it. This is what your children will remember you for.

Kitchenella is laid out as a series of dilemmas. What to make that is cheap and filling? Which dish will please the children? What can I cook when I come in late that is quick yet good for you? How can I remove the fear I have of baking, choose a menu for a special dinner, or use up leftovers in an imaginative way? And how can I plan in advance, so it is hard to be caught without something good to eat?

This book is a conversation between people who share an interest in finding answers. Good food should naturally lead to a moment of chat – a chance to discover a solution to a problem. The opposite is silence. Listen carefully for Kitchenella’s voice, though. It is not the loudest. She won’t show off, but nor will she bully you. She just wants to leave her mark: an indelible, delicious influence.

It has been a long journey from the early days of Habitat in the Sixties to his position of high priest of design in his eyrie at Shad Thames on London’s South Bank. But Sir Terence Conran has never stopped creating lifestyles, developing urban value out of dereliction and turning our homes into tools for living.

His age has progressed in tandem with modernism, the big set of ideas that fuelled him from the start. Now that he is 79, does he feel modernism has finally come of age? Have we reached a stage where, rather than reject homes of glass and steel built with industrial forms and materials, we embrace them? Has the desire for fitness for purpose and the machine-age aesthetic finally settled into our culture, along with the miniskirt, the bentwood chair and the garlic crusher?

“I think modernism has come of age, not to the golf club fraternity in the way we all hoped, though,” Sir Terence says. “Young people who like living in cities now like open-plan, loft-style living. Frankly, they find it difficult to move on into Tudorbethan mass-produced little boxes.”

But even so, they cannot all live in modernist buildings. “People don’t get the chance to live in the Villa Savoye, which is the house I would most like to inhabit in the whole world.” He refers to Le Corbusier’s seminal house built as a “machine for living” in Poissy, France, in 1929. Sir Terence has always wanted us to have a sense of place, as he found when he travelled through France in the Fifties. “The architecture, the wonderful little villages, bakeries, cafés, we didn’t have them,” he says.

Modernist design has probably crept into our lives via loft conversions, and while most of us live in conventional houses, we like the look that he describes.

“The number of houses which are converted to provide modernist interiors is considerable,” Sir Terence says. He is right – we like the glass cube on the back of the Victorian terrace. He lives in an 18th-century mansion near Newbury, West Berkshire, that has been transformed to suit his modern tastes and he has been gutting a London mews for himself and his wife, Vicki. “Georgian proportions are perfect, like modernist proportions,” he says.

Modernist houses are no longer like Marmite – something you love or hate. One enterprising estate agency called The Modern House was established in 2003 solely to handle modern marvels. “We saw a lot of very interesting houses being marketed in quite the wrong way by local estate agents trying to make them look ‘normal’,” the agency’s Albert Hill says. “They need beautiful photography, lots of explanation, history and context.”

Modernism has also been helped by changing fashion. The technological revolution has ushered in a love of the sleek. The colours and shapes of the Fifties and Sixties are fashionable again. In his lifetime, Sir Terence has seen the role of the designer develop from “industrial artist” to whole-life packager and marketer. What is he best known for? “The chicken brick,” he says gleefully. “But I am proudest of the duvet.”

The Conran Partnership, the architectural arm of his empire, has its offices in a glass cube one road back from the Thames. He prowls behind a huge desk on the fourth floor, smoking cigars like a newspaper baron. He has a lynx-like elegance, wears a sharp, electric-blue jacket and is master of all he surveys.

Flanking the cobbles of Shad Thames are the Victorian warehouses he rescued from dereliction in the Eighties. Chefs are busy in Butler’s Wharf Chop House, Le Pont de la Tour and the Cantina del Ponte. Tourists queue for the Design Museum and freshly baked artisan bread wafts from the deli. As you walk through one of the most atmospheric parts of the capital, you absorb the creative flair of the man on the fourth floor with every step.

“It was one of the great moments of my life, realising I could afford to buy over 13 acres on this bank of the river in the early Eighties,” he says. “If you asked a taxi driver for Butler’s Wharf then, they had no idea where it was. There were just a lot of rats and a couple of mad artists living here.”

His plans were hit hard by the recession but even so the area reeks of money, with flats selling for £1 million to £3 million. It is proof that design and vision create value where there was none before.

“It was right by the City, but estate agents didn’t understand it. I told them of my dream for a gastrodome along the river and they gave me stern looks and said: ‘Don’t you know that the City will not cross the bridge to the South Bank?’ ” Sir Terence smiles. He isn’t modest and why should he be?

“We changed the South Bank,” he says. “Tate Modern would never have put itself into Bankside if it hadn’t seen the success of Butler’s Wharf and our little Design Museum.” Plans are afoot to move the museum, which he helped establish, into the Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. The re-creation of Heals, the establishment of The Conran Shop and restaurants, from Bibendum in South Kensington to the Boundary at Shoreditch, have also been part of his campaign to encourage Britain to enjoy the good things in life.

His greatest disdain is reserved for estate agents. “Builders and mortgage lenders consult them and their advice is always that they will find anything with a modern design difficult to sell. They say people don’t want it. But people don’t have the choice because so few modern developments are built.”

As the writer Fiona McCarthy put it, Sir Terence “perceptively exploits urban restlessness”. Shad Thames is just a part of it. Where next? “The opportunity to discover new areas is there, the money isn’t. It is the saddest thing,” he says.

This is recession talk and it comes in spite of his cleverness at using good restaurants as a catalyst in the property market. “It is all to do with the quality of life. A good meal and a decent bottle of wine should be something that everyone can enjoy. It changes the neighbourhood.”

He never stops thinking about problems that might be solved with a clever application of engineering or design. “If I could bring my version of good taste to the masses then I will rest a happy man,” Sir Terence said years ago. That statement still stands today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/interiorsandshopping/7977334/Sir-Terence-Conran-Modernisms-shining-knight.html

Ludlow first established a reputation as a foodie’s paradise in the mid-Nineties. Then, the town boasted three Michelin starred restaurants in a town of 10,000, outclassing Birmingham, with a population of more than a million people.

Now the town of Bray in Berkshire is top of the star charts (seven and counting), with culinary megastar Heston Blumenthal owning three establishments there. But as Will Holland, chef at Ludlow’s La Bécasse and holder of one of the town’s current brace of stars, explains, posh restaurants aren’t everything.

“Michelin-starred chefs create a buzz, but Ludlow is far more than that. There’s a whole foodie culture. We have great shops and smaller places too,” he says.

He lists the three butchers, three artisan bakers, two cheesemongers and a market place packed with stalls four days a week.

“As a chef, just walking through the town is inspiring. There’s sourdough bread made with flour from the mill down the road, raspberries from the market garden nearby, and venison in the butchers from Mortimer Forest, which I can see from my kitchen door,” he says.

The town revels in the quality of the produce on its doorstep, an enthusiasm that spills over into the annual Ludlow Food Festival, the country’s longest established food festival and this year sponsored, for the first time, by the Telegraph.

Now in its 16th year, it’s also one of the largest. Last year, 21,000 people streamed through the medieval castle gates to visit the stalls and demonstrations within.

Chris Bradley, the Glaswegian chef at Mr Underhill’s, a Michelin-starred joint just a cheese-roll down the hill from the castle, agrees that Ludlow is remarkable. “We come back from holiday and think we wouldn’t mind having a holiday here,” he says.

Both Chris Bradley and Will Holland will be demonstrating at the festival, as will Rose Prince and I. And Bradley will also be judging a “Skillbuilder” competition for young local chefs, paving the way for the next generation of Ludlow’s star restaurants.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/7978193/Ludlow-Food-Festival-Foodies-paradise.html

Like the villagers in the 1953 Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt, the British are supposed to love their railways. Until, that is, someone wants to build one passing a mile or two from their home, in which case they are quickly aroused into a state of fury about the effect on their house prices. Never mind Swampy, new road schemes can be far more popular with homeowners than a proposed high-speed railway.

There has been such bitter opposition to High Speed Two (HS2) – the proposed express line from Euston to Birmingham, Manchester and the North – that the Government last month unveiled an Exceptional Hardship Scheme for owners of properties blighted by the plans. If you need to sell your home to change jobs, for economic reasons or because of illness and you can prove, after trying to market your property for more than three months, that its value has been adversely affected by the plans to the tune of 15 per cent or more, you can now apply for the Government to buy your property from you at what would be full market price were it not for the planned railway.

The railway line is not even planned to be completed until 2024, but properties have been blighted thanks to a draft document published in March by High Speed Two Ltd, the company set up by the last government to promote the project. The affected properties on the Chiltern section of the line lie mostly along the A413 between Ruislip and Aylesbury, the preferred “Route Three”, though homeowners on two of the other proposed routes less favoured by the company have also reported trouble in selling their homes.

HS2 Action Alliance, a pressure group set up to fight the plans and help residents gain compensation, claims that properties a mile and a half from Route Three have seen their values fall by up to 30 per cent. The group has studied the case of 39 properties that have been on the market since the plans for the railway were announced in March. In 24 cases, vendors reported little or no interest in their homes, in spite of price reductions in 13 of those cases. Three vendors reported that potential buyers had withdrawn after learning of the plans, but seven sales had proceeded at a price lower than the vendor had previously expected. In five cases the vendor had withdrawn their homes from the market after learning about the plans.

Of course, such a study has to be read with caution: vendors have a vested interest in talking down their sales’ prospects in the hope of qualifying for the Exceptional Hardship Scheme, and sales remain subdued all over the country. But there is little question that HS2 has trimmed the value from property along its proposed route. It has brought the prospect of noise without the promise of a faster way of commuting to London: no station is planned between London and Birmingham.

HS2 would cause less havoc according to James del Mar of Knight Frank, who has been handling compensation claims on behalf of property owners, if the railway was going to be built tomorrow. “As soon as someone whispers the route of a road or railway, the value of properties plummets,” he says. “Then, as the project becomes closer to happening, values level off. The perception is often worse than the reality. The owner of a £1 million property who has a road or railway built at the bottom of his 10-acre garden might think the value has fallen by half, but to a buyer the fall in value is often much less.”

In contrast, a big road project in the south-east has been warmly welcomed by homeowners. By next spring, motorists driving down the A3 south of Guildford will no longer wind their way around the Devil’s Punchbowl and through Hindhead on a single carriageway: the Highways Agency is building a new bypass. Partly as a result of protests that accompanied road schemes in the Nineties, the Government rejected a surface route in favour of a 1.25-mile tunnel through the hills. While the road has caused blight for a few properties (it involves short stretches of new access road at either end of the tunnel), many more will be relieved of traffic. The road will offer faster commuting times for motorists and remove traffic on the existing A3. And a couple of miles of the existing road to the north of the town will be grassed over and turned into a cycleway.

In contrast to estate agents in the Chilterns, Anthony Daykin of Heward and Daykin in Hindhead has flaunted the construction project, adding a large display in his window. “The beauty of it is that as far as I know not a single property has been demolished, but it will have a substantial effect on the area.” That includes not only Hindhead and Haslemere, closest to the new road, but Liphook, Petersfield and all down the A3 corridor to Portsmouth.

Charity Holden of Savills in Guildford says there has been a rise in demand in Haslemere. “It is too early to say the effect on prices in Hindhead, as owners are holding off putting their properties onto the market until the new road is open.” According to the Land Registry there has not been a single property sold in Portsmouth Road — as the A3 is known through Hindhead — since June 2008.

A chance to buy a house overlooking a road that has been turned into a cycle path? Maybe it is somewhere that Swampy will consider.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertymarket/7968428/House-prices-Has-high-speed-rail-hijacked-your-home.html

Like the villagers in the 1953 Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt, the British are supposed to love their railways. Until, that is, someone wants to build one passing a mile or two from their home, in which case they are quickly aroused into a state of fury about the effect on their house prices. Never mind Swampy, new road schemes can be far more popular with homeowners than a proposed high-speed railway.

There has been such bitter opposition to High Speed Two (HS2) – the proposed express line from Euston to Birmingham, Manchester and the North – that the Government last month unveiled an Exceptional Hardship Scheme for owners of properties blighted by the plans. If you need to sell your home to change jobs, for economic reasons or because of illness and you can prove, after trying to market your property for more than three months, that its value has been adversely affected by the plans to the tune of 15 per cent or more, you can now apply for the Government to buy your property from you at what would be full market price were it not for the planned railway.

The railway line is not even planned to be completed until 2024, but properties have been blighted thanks to a draft document published in March by High Speed Two Ltd, the company set up by the last government to promote the project. The affected properties on the Chiltern section of the line lie mostly along the A413 between Ruislip and Aylesbury, the preferred “Route Three”, though homeowners on two of the other proposed routes less favoured by the company have also reported trouble in selling their homes.

HS2 Action Alliance, a pressure group set up to fight the plans and help residents gain compensation, claims that properties a mile and a half from Route Three have seen their values fall by up to 30 per cent. The group has studied the case of 39 properties that have been on the market since the plans for the railway were announced in March. In 24 cases, vendors reported little or no interest in their homes, in spite of price reductions in 13 of those cases. Three vendors reported that potential buyers had withdrawn after learning of the plans, but seven sales had proceeded at a price lower than the vendor had previously expected. In five cases the vendor had withdrawn their homes from the market after learning about the plans.

Of course, such a study has to be read with caution: vendors have a vested interest in talking down their sales’ prospects in the hope of qualifying for the Exceptional Hardship Scheme, and sales remain subdued all over the country. But there is little question that HS2 has trimmed the value from property along its proposed route. It has brought the prospect of noise without the promise of a faster way of commuting to London: no station is planned between London and Birmingham.

HS2 would cause less havoc according to James del Mar of Knight Frank, who has been handling compensation claims on behalf of property owners, if the railway was going to be built tomorrow. “As soon as someone whispers the route of a road or railway, the value of properties plummets,” he says. “Then, as the project becomes closer to happening, values level off. The perception is often worse than the reality. The owner of a £1 million property who has a road or railway built at the bottom of his 10-acre garden might think the value has fallen by half, but to a buyer the fall in value is often much less.”

In contrast, a big road project in the south-east has been warmly welcomed by homeowners. By next spring, motorists driving down the A3 south of Guildford will no longer wind their way around the Devil’s Punchbowl and through Hindhead on a single carriageway: the Highways Agency is building a new bypass. Partly as a result of protests that accompanied road schemes in the Nineties, the Government rejected a surface route in favour of a 1.25-mile tunnel through the hills. While the road has caused blight for a few properties (it involves short stretches of new access road at either end of the tunnel), many more will be relieved of traffic. The road will offer faster commuting times for motorists and remove traffic on the existing A3. And a couple of miles of the existing road to the north of the town will be grassed over and turned into a cycleway.

In contrast to estate agents in the Chilterns, Anthony Daykin of Heward and Daykin in Hindhead has flaunted the construction project, adding a large display in his window. “The beauty of it is that as far as I know not a single property has been demolished, but it will have a substantial effect on the area.” That includes not only Hindhead and Haslemere, closest to the new road, but Liphook, Petersfield and all down the A3 corridor to Portsmouth.

Charity Holden of Savills in Guildford says there has been a rise in demand in Haslemere. “It is too early to say the effect on prices in Hindhead, as owners are holding off putting their properties onto the market until the new road is open.” According to the Land Registry there has not been a single property sold in Portsmouth Road — as the A3 is known through Hindhead — since June 2008.

A chance to buy a house overlooking a road that has been turned into a cycle path? Maybe it is somewhere that Swampy will consider.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertymarket/7968428/House-prices-Has-high-speed-rail-hijacked-your-home.html