The Lustleigh Show, 2026
Lustleigh, Devon, August ‘26
A particular kind of English happiness can only be achieved in a field, in questionable weather, while examining someone else's marrow, and it is on generous display at the Lustleigh Show.
I arrived on the August bank holiday under a sky that couldn't decide whether to drizzle or merely threaten to, which is to say a perfectly normal Devon summer's day, and found half of Dartmoor assembled in a meadow doing the things the English do best: queuing cheerfully, judging vegetables with the gravity of a war-crimes tribunal, and drinking tea out of urns large enough to baptise a Labrador.
The village of Lustleigh itself is almost aggressively pretty — all thatch and cob and cottages that look as though they were designed to appear on a biscuit tin and have never quite recovered from the shock — and it lends the whole affair the air of something staged for the benefit of a passing tourist, which, in my case, it more or less was.
The heart of the thing is the produce tent, a canvas cathedral of quiet menace where grown adults have submitted their finest onions, their most symmetrical runner beans, and jars of jam labelled in handwriting that suggests they take this very seriously indeed. I lingered too long over a class for "five potatoes of a kind," trying to understand the invisible criteria by which one man's potatoes had triumphed and another's had been left, in effect, to rot in the shame of a "Highly Commended" card. I came away none the wiser but strangely moved. Elsewhere there were Victoria sponges lined up like defendants, dahlias the size of dinner plates, and a children's class for a garden made on a plate, which produced miniature landscapes of such earnest ambition that I found myself, quite unexpectedly, having to look at the sky for a moment. Outside, terriers raced, ferrets were admired, and a tug-of-war team strained against one another with the red-faced intensity of men settling a grievance that predates living memory.
What makes the Lustleigh Show so thoroughly winning , like the Soho Summer Fête, is that none of it is remotely necessary and all of it is done with total conviction. Nobody, in the twenty-first century, needs to know whose bantams are best or whose fruitcake achieves the ideal density, and yet here were several hundred people who plainly did need to know, and had waited a year to find out. It is the great, daft, indestructible machinery of the English village asserting, once again, that community is a thing you build in a muddy field with a raffle and a beer tent and a man on a loudspeaker apologising for the tannoy. I left with a slice of cake I hadn't meant to buy, a rosette-shaped hole in my understanding of horticulture, and the settled conviction that any country capable of taking this much trouble over a courgette is, whatever its other failings and despite The Donald’s best efforts, going to be perfectly all right.
