Tag Archives: Resilience Garden

A Craft Interlude – Grape Juice

October 18, 2020crafts, Food, gardening, Recipes for Resilience, survival skillslocal food, Resilience Garden, Resilience Handbook, solutions, survival skillsElizabeth J Walker

In the twenty years since I planted a tiny little stick, it has become a huge grape vine, sweeping around the side of the house and smothering the shed roof.Although it produces a tremendous amount of fruit, the grapes are small. Most of their insides are occupied by two large seeds. They’re not much use for eating, but with a bit of effort can provide a lovely juice.

The first task is to pick the grapes and leave them in a basin covered with cold water for about ten minutes. This allows any insects among the bunches to escape, and some of the debris to float to the top where you can scoop it off.

Take the bunches out one at a time, strip off the grapes and compost the stalks.

Now you need to squish the fruit to extract the juice. We tried a small fruit press, but it wasn’t any faster than crushing the grapes by hand through an ordinary sieve.

The picture above shows two stages. First the grapes are squeezed through the sieve in the centre, then the juice is poured into a larger sieve lined with muslin. The smaller sieve needs frequent rinsing out, and the muslin has to be changed quite often. Sterilise the cloth by soaking in brewers’ grade steriliser (or Milton fluid) and rinsing well in clean water. Wear a plastic apron if you have one, as the whole process can be very wet.

The pictures below shows the muslin clogged with fine particles. Move the cloth around to use clean areas, but you’ll need a good half dozen pieces ready to use.

The juice collected in the second pan can now be pasteurised. Always use stainless steel pans for making fruit juice. Non-stick will work, but not cast-iron. If you use enamelled pans, make sure there are no chips in the surface.

Heat the juice gently to at least 70 degrees Celsius and hold it there for at least a minute. Stir it to make sure the heat is distributed all the way through. You ought to use a cooking thermometer for this. However, we brought both our batches to nearly 100 degrees (boiling point), by not paying enough attention, and it didn’t harm the juice. So if you can’t get hold of a thermometer, it should be okay to just let the juice gently bubble, then turn the heat straight off.

If it’s not done enough, it’ll ferment in the bottles, so always use proper swing-top beer bottles, or corked wine bottles to store home-made juices. Never use screw-top bottles, as they might explode.

This is the juice just after being heated. Note that it still has impurities in it even after the straining. We pasteurised one batch in the bottles, but these impurities rose to the top and made a mess, so we redid that batch as above. We strained the pasteurised juice through clean muslin again, and decanted it into sterilised bottles.Note the second straining doesn’t leave so much residue. Even with these precautions, there’s still a little sediment in the finished bottles once they’ve settled for a few days!

Rinse out the bottles, preferably with hot water. Glass can crack if it’s too cold when you pour hot liquids in. Note the work surface is covered with a towel; this had to be changed for a dry one at regular intervals. It isn’t a fast process; with the first batch it took me about 8 hours to fill a dozen bottles with the finished juice!

It’s worth the trouble though. Home pressed grape juice is delicious, free of additives, and thoroughly resilient. Our next project is to try and extract grape seed oil from the residues, but we might leave that for next year!

A Review of Emergency Stores in the Resilient Household

April 16, 2020Food stores, gardening, pandemic, resilience, survival skillspreparing for emergencies, Recipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, Resilience Handbook, solutionsElizabeth J Walker

After staying within the confines of the Resilience Garden for three weeks, I thought it’d be a good time to see how my food stores were holding up.

Naturally, I have the box containing the fortnight’s worth of emergency supplies, as described in ‘Recipes for Resilience – Common Sense Cooking for the 21^st Century’. I’ve hardly touched this, so I still have a good reserve if the kitchen stocks get low.

These are unusually high. Despite my reservations about freezer stores (see ‘Recipes’ page 171), I inherited a small front-opening freezer from a lodger. I was only just ahead of the panic-buying curve in filling it up, but went into lock-down with a good selection of frozen food. I targeted fresh meat, fruit and other ingredients rather than ready meals. I’d already discovered that a partly empty freezer consumes noticeably more electricity than a full one does, so as I use the supplies, I fill up spaces with packs of sliced bread or home-made cake.

Freezer stores for Zombie Apocalypse, day 22

A short power cut reminded me of the vulnerability of this method of storage, so I’ve been focussing on using up the freezer contents! The food I chose can be quickly cooked, even preserved, if the power really goes down.

The leeks in the Resilience Garden have just finished. I bought a small sack of onions in anticipation of this. The rocket has started to bolt, but there’s plenty of wild garlic for fresh green leaves and the broccoli is ready. The potatoes are finished; they refuse to stop sprouting now, unless drenched with toxic chemicals. Carbohydrates of all kinds are out of season. This is when one turns to dried grains, pasta, rice and flour products.

There’s a few gaps showing after so long living on stores. It’s a bad time of year for fruit. I should have acquired more of the tinned and dried varieties. I’ll have to adjust my usual diet a little to use these up in rotation. No food is wasted using the Resilience plans!

I’m very fond of little trifles, and always get a pack when I do my infrequent re-stocking at a supermarket. However, a packet jelly with frozen fruit makes six small dishes full, and a tin of custard provides enough topping for these. I should’ve put away more jelly and custard, plus some sort of cream!

I don’t like storing UHT milk as it has a relatively short shelf life and really does go off. It’s hard for me to use up, as I’m accustomed to have fresh farm milk delivered. When the milk deliveries suddenly went out of business last week, it was a bit of a shock!

It was a good opportunity to open up the bag of milk powder and get that used. Another firm has taken over the milk round now, so all is well with dairy produce again.

Local shops have regrouped and are offering deliveries as well, so I can order in some seasonal produce. I feel I need to support them, but it’s hard to find enough things I need. Rhubarb is good – mine is still too new to harvest – and cauliflower is in season. Mostly I buy more honey, which keeps forever.

In summary, after three weeks living very well on stores, I could still last for months. Tea and coffee might have to be replaced with garden herbs. I’m already out of chocolate and sweets, and the last packet of biscuits is being rationed. The reserve milk is gone, but I have Vitamin D tablets on board.

Following the Resilience Plan, not only will you be set up for food stores whenever something happens, but none of the food will be wasted!

‘Recipes’ gives detailed instructions on how to achieve personal food security and can be bought direct from the publishers.

‘The Resilience Handbook – How to Survive in the 21^st Century’ has now been re-released as ‘The Handbook of Practical Resilience – How to Survive in the 21^st Century’, with additional content!

How to survive? You need these books.

Brexit and the Resilience Garden

March 27, 2019Brexit, Disaster planning, gardening, resilience, writingRecipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, solutions, vegetablesElizabeth J Walker

Many people in Britain are growing their own vegetables for the first time. In a country which currently only produces 60% of its food supplies, that’s always a good move. It’s taken the uncertainties of Brexit to bring this home.

Emergency planning is the same motive that inspired me to create the Resilience Garden over a decade ago. I feel for those people out there at the beginning of their journey; the frustrations they will face and the triumphs they’ll enjoy!

There’s a lot to learn about resilience gardening. so much that I had to write another book about it. Here’s a selection of top tips from ‘Recipes for Resilience‘ :-

It’s all about soil. Look after it, feed it, don’t tread on it. Use raised beds, keep to paths.
A planting chart on your wall saves having to leaf through books or websites with muddy hands.
If you don’t have an outside tap, fill a bucket with clean water ready to rinse your hands. You’ll need them clean and dry to handle seeds.
Look after your tools; give them a wipe and put them away at the end of each session.
If you’re using stakes, cover the ends with padding so they don’t poke you in the eye. It’s hard to see them from above!
Collect old buckets and basins. Placed strategically around the garden, they will harvest rainwater for you, saving a trip from the tap. Make sure wildlife can escape from the water, and watch out for slugs moving in underneath.
You have to squish slugs and snails. Sorry. Once hedgehogs and thrushes would have done the job for you, and if you poison your pesky molluscs this day will be so much further away.
You also have to thin out vegetables like carrots. Steel yourself to compost those little baby plants! Avoid this trauma by becoming an expert at sowing thinly.
Cultivating vegetables is a compromise between what you like to eat and what the garden wants to grow. Allowing the garden to win gives you much less work. Leeks are just as useful as onions.

Do not dig up your potatoes to see if they are growing!

Happy gardening!

‘Recipes for Resilience‘ covers the whole growing year, with gardening tips, seasonal recipes and historical background. I’m excited to announce that the book is now available through Amazon and other regular outlets!

Meanwhile, I’m having to change publisher for the Resilience Handbook as well – if you want one of the limited first edition copies, order now!

Reflections on 2018 – the Year of the Earth Dog

January 8, 2019events, gardening, Resilience Handbook, travelDiary post, Resilience Garden, Resilience Plan, Town Tree Farm, War of the WorldsElizabeth J Walker

A strange year, which somehow seemed to span two or three, yet provide hardly any time for writing.

I’m sure the dramatic contrast of heavy snow in March with the searing drought of June contributed to this illusion. It was certainly hard work to grow food, and we’re going to redesign the allotment towards even lower maintenance.

It’s being replaced by more raised beds in the Resilience Garden, to fully utilise the south-facing aspect. When I worked at outdoor events, this area was paved to store equipment trailers; now the slabs look untidy, so I’m just creating another layer on top. Our experiences with the allotment validated our use of raised beds in difficult growing areas. One day town car parks may return to the market gardens they once were.

I completed my photo diary of Towntree Farm in all its seasons. It’s a pity I couldn’t catch it under snow, but I’d never be able to get there through the lanes! Now I just have to sort the pictures and decide what to print. I plan to make an album as a gift to the farmer.

Having retired from event services, ambushed by a lack of pension, I supplement earnings from my writings by cleaning in some of the high-end bed and breakfast places locally. The sense of ambience developed by arranging festivals is a completely transferable skill. A room cannot be cleaned properly for a new guest in under an hour – if I can’t have that when travelling, I’d rather go to hostels.

However, there are only a limited number of hours in the day to accomplish this. Visitors start to leave at ten and new ones will arrive by four o’clock at the latest. The work should be done by then – many cleaners prefer to be unseen by guests, like invisible fairies!

The nature of the job is thus that one must work six days a week to earn enough to keep a house going at even the most basic level. A room in a shared house would be easier to manage, but this is part of the resilience agenda where I encounter barriers. Shared housing is increasingly popular among young people in cities, but not well supported elsewhere.

Despite the hard work and general air of gloom over the latter part of the year, I did manage a couple of short adventures. My daughter took me to Cardiff to see Jeff Wayne’s ‘War of the Worlds’ musical show, which was awesome!

waiting for the show to start war of the worlds dec18 — waiting for the show to start

The whole concept is unique, harking back as it does to a book written 120 years ago, and the performers did it justice. The way in which sound, lighting and special effects can be combined these days would surely delight the original author, whose love of science was well known!

We stayed at the Park Plaza Hotel, which was pleasant and well situated. We were able to walk from the central station and leave our luggage at the desk, since we were early for check in. Xmas shopping was in full swing; we picked up novelties like chocolate spanners and giant marshmallow teacakes, which haven’t made it to rural Somerset yet.

A rare double decker carousel entertains Xmas crowds in Cardiff

An excellent buffet breakfast in the morning, and more retail therapy in the big city, before returning to Somerset by train and bus. I’m using public transport, instead of driving, far more these days – another car on the roads doesn’t seem helpful.

The Park Plaza Hotel grows some of its own kitchen herbs – very resilient!

There was barely time to repack my bags before I had to head off for a few days in London….but that’s another story

When I speak of the plans based on ‘The Resilience Handbook – How to Survive in the 21st Century’ I refer to ‘Level One’. This is, as described in the Handbook, the very basic level of practical resilience which should be second nature to any citizen, and is easily achievable even today.

The universal understanding of key infrastructure is crucial. Remote, centralised systems should be moved towards local management. We need to become a resilient civilisation, and start the long process now. There are clear, measurable goals at every level from personal to global.

I’ve refrained from describing further levels until now, collecting feedback on the first stages of the Resilience Project, but I have been exploring them. The work I’m doing on food security would be about Level Five, I suppose. It’s embedded in a much deeper lifestyle change though – living as though resilience was already happening. What would be the same? How might things change?

Buy ‘The Resilience Handbook – How to Survive in the 21st Century’ from this site, not through Amazon, so that the project actually benefits from your purchase.

As the song says don’t ‘give all your money to millionaires’!

Next post – Ice and Mirrors

Food, Travel and Practical Resilience

September 20, 2018Food, resilience, travelallotment, Diary post, Recipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, soil, solutionsElizabeth J Walker

Things have felt pretty relentless this summer – no sooner have I dealt with one thing than another challenge comes forward! Many other people seem to be experiencing the same problem; if you’re one of them, I think October should be a bit calmer. It’ll be a ‘new normal’ though.

With the struggle to keep the vegetables watered, we’ve had to let half of the Resilience Allotment go. The soil isn’t only poor, but infested with smothering weeds and disease. The brassicas succumb to a white mildew, peas dislike the exposed site and potato blight is endemic (because it’s ‘such a good idea’ to plant sprouting supermarket potatoes).

Beans, garlic and courgettes do well, and the raised beds used clean soil imported from the Resilience Garden so the potato crop was small but healthy. Due to years of selective weeding, this soil is full of seeds from edible plants. Left unattended for awhile, borage, marigold, rocket and spinach flourish. Unlike the perennial weeds they replace, these plants can be pulled up easily and composted.

Towards the end of autumn, I’ll clear the ground and plant broad beans and garlic. Instead of the allotment area, I plan to build a few more raised beds in the garden. It’s easier to cultivate food plants nearer home when you have a busy lifestyle!

However, growing just that bit of extra food has meant far less trips to the supermarket, with a considerable saving in money. I got caught out the other day though. Hungry, and with a day’s wages in my pocket, I popped into the local supermarket to get a little piece of steak and some mustard. The bill for all the things I didn’t really need came to over £25! And I forgot the mustard!

Food is a major part of community resilience. It’s such a large subject that I had to write another book (‘Recipes for Resilience’ – out soon!) just to cover the basics of gardening and cooking.

Travel, on the other hand, benefits your personal resilience, as well as providing a welcome break from a dull or oppressive routine, You don’t have to go far – take a picnic lunch and buy a Day Explorer bus ticket. Pretend to be a tourist in your local area for the day.

Travel takes you out of your comfort zone and lets you practise carrying just what you need to get by. Combine it with attending a workshop on your chosen craft, or even go on a survival course for maximum resilience!

So that’s why I write a lot about food and travel. There are many other aspects to practical resilience however, and I’ll spend some time this winter going over the other sections of the Resilience Wheel.

Keep paying attention!

May Diary 2018

May 23, 2018events, gardening, South West England, travelallotment, community, Diary post, Resilience Garden, Resilience Handbook, Somerset, survival skills, vegetablesElizabeth J Walker

The challenges of growing vegetables continue; a very brief Spring has been swiftly followed by long hot days with no rain. The seedlings, root systems stunted by the unseasonable cold, struggle to gather water from the hard soil.

A greenhouse is becoming essential to cope with this erratic weather. If you plan to assemble your own, read the instructions carefully and proceed slowly. Photos of the demonstration model in the garden centre could prove useful.

Watering the allotment, some miles from where I live, is a daily chore. Mature plants are doing far better than fresh sowings, but I’m still concerned about the meagre amount of food coming up. The Resilience Garden benefits from waste household water and a handy tap.

The role of water in cultivation is highlighted by this drought. The kitchen gardens of old came as much from the availability of used water as from the convenience of having herbs to hand.

Early summer is a time of leisure for the resilience smallholder, of watching the plants grow and enjoying the flowers. Many events, cancelled because of the snow, reinvented themselves. Seedy Sunday became Seedling Sunday…

Somerset Day was celebrated…

…and there was a Graffiti Day at the skateboard park.

We went to try out the archery at Mendip Snowsports Centre, and discovered Frisbee Golf! Although not all the baskets were this deep in woodland, my frisbee always headed for the nearest nettle patch!

The centre offers bushcraft and target shooting, as well as the artificial slopes for snow-related activities. There’s a pleasant cafe and bar; a good place to have a day brushing up your resilience skills.

Networking is an important part of community resilience, a whole section of the Resilience Plan. People need to exchange news after the winter season, when travel can be limited. It’s important to be aware of dangers and opportunities in the local area and beyond.

The concept of ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ was identified before the internet was developed; we need not be dependent on technology for our world news. Local events, with their travelling pedlars and performers, were once key information nodes, and often more fun!

The free soap nuts were a great success! — The free soap nuts were a great success at the Repair Cafe!

May Day in Glastonbury 2018

May 12, 2018events, Food, gardening, South West England, travelBeltane, community, Diary post, May Day, Recipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, Somerset, vegetablesElizabeth J Walker

When Spring finally arrived in Somerset, it came with all the gardening jobs it was just too cold to tackle earlier. May is proving another busy month! The festival of Beltane, marking the start of summer, should be the time when you can relax, stop treading on the soil, and watch your crops grow.

This year, I had three batches of peas fail to come up – though one is starting to show now – which was a disaster, since this is a heritage variety called Telegraph which I’m seed-saving from. The very last seeds were being soaked before planting – something I don’t normally bother with – when I took a day off to attend the May Day festivities in Glastonbury.

The Tuesday market was occupying the Market Cross, so the Morris dancing took place on the newly acquired patio of the Town Hall. Speeches and bardic recitations followed until the Maypole itself was carried down the High Street by the Green Men.

More speeches and announcements followed. I was at the edge of a growing crowd and it felt like the sketch from the ‘Life of Brian’ (‘What did he say?’ ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers, I think’). The procession wended back up the High Street, past the White Spring to Bushy Combe, as described in this post from 2015.

The White Spring is run by a committee of volunteers now, who endeavour to keep it open as much as possible. It’s well worth seeing if you’re in the area!

The Maypole was duly erected following more ceremonies and recitations. I would have preferred blessings on my peas to vague invocations of universal love, but few people appreciate vegetables these days.

It’s a colourful spectacle though; both celebrants and audience take some trouble to dress up for the occasion. The practical aspects, such as untangling the ribbons as the pole goes up, offer plenty of breaks for chatting.

Quite often in previous years, the ribbons ended up tangled in a big clump off to one side of the pole! Now, enough people have got the hang of the right way to weave in and out that they can keep others on the right track – anyone at the ceremony can take a ribbon and join the dance.

This nice tight winding lasted all the way down. During most of the dance, four strong Green Men braced the pole, as it takes a surprising amount of strain from the flimsy ribbons! The completed pole is moved when all is done, and stored until next year when a new pole and ribbons are sourced, since the field is needed for other things.

The Community section of the Resilience Handbook provides advice on organising your own community events. These are a good way to meet neighbours. Even casual acquaintance helps, should you ever need to cope with an emergency together. Make a point of attending local events, if only in a ‘walk-on’ role!

More about Foraging

April 9, 2018Environment, Food, gardeningarum lily, bluebell, cuckoopint, preparing for emergencies, Recipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, Resilience Handbook, solutions, survival skills, wild garlicElizabeth J Walker

Wild garlic, or ramsoms, is growing in profusion now. It can be used in many recipes, added to soups and stews, or washed and munched raw.

Below is the young leaf of a Cuckoopint, or Arum Lily. These often grow in the same patch as wild garlic – weed them out of your own forage area. Pay attention to the leaf veins. They are branched, as opposed to the garlic which has parallel veins like a grass blade. The arrow shape becomes more pronounced as the leaves mature.

If you eat cuckoopint by accident, it will cause a burning sensation in your mouth which can last for several days.

Bluebell comes out a little later, so it’s fairly easy to tell the leaves apart from wild garlic, which will be moving into the flowering stage by then. It occupies the same woodland habitat as the garlic too.

All these leaves vanish completely in the summer, except for the cuckoopint which goes on to produce its vivid orange berry spikes. These are also poisonous to humans. No sign of any of these plants is visible in autumn and winter. However, the edible bulbs of the wild garlic are still there underground.

When learning this plant series, it’s identifying these bulbs which you should concentrate on. Without any other clues, it could be tricky; you need to avoid including cuckoopint or bluebell in your forage.

Establish specimens of each in pots and watch them grow. Dig up some roots and study them. Wash your hands after breaking up the cuckoopint; if you have sensitive skin, it may be worth wearing gloves. Once you have thoroughly learned all three, you are equipped to forage for them in the woods, should you ever need wild food.

In order to protect these important plants, it is illegal to dig them up in the UK without the permission of the landowner. Hence you should grow your own for study.

When you do, you will observe that the tiny first-year roots of all three look much the same – an oval white bulb about the size of a match head. Only gather the larger wild garlic bulbs which have developed the brownish root skin.

Action task 9 in the Food section of the Resilience Assessment requires you to go on a walk to identify edible wild plants. Look for wild garlic in local woods or under trees in parks. Are there more plants which grow in that area, such as daffodils, which you need to be confident of identifying?

The simple questions in the Resilience Handbook encourage you to establish a layer of underpinning knowledge upon which you can build your resilient lifestyle!

April Diary 2018

April 3, 2018Environment, Food, gardeningburdock, ecosystems, foxglove, Recipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, Somerset, survival skills, wasabiElizabeth J Walker

The weather in the Summerlands went straight from cold and icy to cold and wet. I planted some onions, but the peas went in the neighbour’s greenhouse to get started, and the potatoes are still chitting in the shed. I found out that you should wait until the soil is roughly the same temperature as the potatoes before planting them. I’m experimenting with new varieties this year, so there should be notes.

The wasabi plants thought they might die, so they flowered again; they haven’t done this since the last snow, seven years ago! There are four pots, all cloned from the same rootstock, and they all flowered at once, even the one kept some miles away at the allotment.

Starting with a scrawny two-year plant from the market, over the years their leaves have become smaller, glossier and tougher. Wasabi are awkward customers in that they like damp but cope badly with slugs; they make up for this by thriving in the cold weather.

I planted out the burdock salvaged from the resilience field. Three plants had shared a pot over the winter, and their calorie-rich roots grew so fast that there was hardly any soil left. I’m hoping to start a breeding colony in the woodland strip.

I’ve written about burdock in ‘Recipes for Resilience’ as it’s a good emergency food source. The root fattens up in the first year, and is used up in the second summer to produce the large flowering stems. This is a good time of year to harvest these roots, but only the spring leaves can be seen.

Compared with….

Growing both these plants in your Resilience Garden enables you to study them in detail, so you won’t dig up the wrong one – note the foxglove is kept in a pot. Feel the leaf textures and observe the shades of green.

Practise identifying them on a forest walk – but don’t dig up wild plants as that’s illegal in the UK unless you have the landowner’s permission and it’s not an endangered species. Take pictures, and return later in the year to see if you were right. It takes a couple of years’ study to really learn a plant.

The dismal, threatening weather meant the planned Magic Oxygen Literary Prize Giving was filmed for YouTube. None of us were confident about travelling to Lyme Regis, given the weather forecast! Although we didn’t get much snow here in the South, the rain was relentless and there was a lot of water on the roads.

Saturday itself was almost a nice day. I worked on some of the infrastructure projects in the garden, feeling that these should have been finished weeks ago. The plum tree is blossoming with the utmost caution; the bumblebees are about, but I haven’t seen any honey bees yet.

Winter slinks out of the door, turning to snarl “I’ll be back!”, as Spring tiptoes tentatively in.

A Significant Encounter in the Water Village

December 16, 2017adventure, China, resilient communities, travelcommunity, Kezhi Yuan, Recipes for Resilience, Resilience Garden, Shanghai, ZhujiajiaoElizabeth J Walker

On the second day, there was a trip to one of the water villages around Shanghai. The city is built on the delta of the Yangtze River; the surrounding countryside is crossed by many small rivers. To the west of the urban area, there are several ancient towns which preserve much original culture. We were going to Zhujiajiao, about 50 km from the city.

We began our explorations in the Kezhi Gardens. Our guide led us through the living areas, now displaying various examples of the crafts once practised there, to a large room which housed a model of the original design.

I was stunned – it was an exact depiction of the imaginary ‘resilience village’ which I’d described in ‘Recipes for Resilience’! The establishment used to house not only an extended family, but also students learning about plants. The ethic was that the whole community would work on the fields and vegetable gardens, as well as studying, in order to have a balanced life.

Although the place had undergone changes – at one point it was a junior school, and is now an exhibition – the small craft workshops still housed skilled artisans. You can watch paper-cutting, calligraphy and embroidery; pick up some pretty souvenirs.

Some of the extensive fields survive as a demonstration area on the other side of the lovely formal gardens. I saw rice ready for harvest for the first time; it certainly seems to give a good yield of grain.

The garden itself was lovely. There was more space here than in the Yu Yuan; the water features were more intricate and the pavillions grander, with higher levels. You can see more pictures here, and read a brief history.

Too soon we had to continue our tour, emerging to take a walk along the riverfront and down the narrow colourful alleyways. These were lined with small stalls – the weather is quite warm here, even in November – selling all manner of enticing articles. Often the craftspeople themselves would be there, working on their next piece as they waited for customers.

We paused for roll call by the famous Fang Sheng bridge, and were let off to explore. Across the bridge was an area of new development; modern apartments and shops, with the ubiquitous Starbucks. Part of the old bank was artificially preserved to ensure the survival of the old culture; the rest seemed to have managed it unaided.

The old and new in Zhujiajiao; the man in the boat is clearing weeds from the river

Zhujiajiao water village is one of the closest to Shanghai. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can get there by public transport. Most city hotels provide small bilingual cards at Reception, instructing taxi drivers on returning wandering guests to the right address; make sure you pick one up if you’re going exploring without a guide.

Next week: Towers, silk and shopping in Shanghai

elizabethjwalker

Author, teacher, consultant. Plan your future in uncertain times with 'The Resilience Handbook – how to survive in the 21st century'. Find out more….