County in England
Worcestershire
Worcestershire gave the world a sauce that was nearly poured down the drain, a composer who wrote Nimrod, and a cricket ground where the cathedral looks on.
Key information
- County
- Worcestershire
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 610,000 (2021 Census)
- Known for
- Worcestershire sauce, Royal Worcester porcelain, the Malvern Hills, Elgar
- What locals are called
- Worcestershire folk; people from the city are Worcesterians
- Famous people
- Edward Elgar, A. E. Housman, Stanley Baldwin, Graeme Hick
About Worcestershire
The sauce that was left in the cellar
Worcestershire's most famous export began, according to the well-worn legend, as a mistake. Two chemists in Worcester, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, were asked to recreate a recipe a nobleman had brought back from India. The first taste was reportedly so foul they shut the barrels away in a cellar. When they rediscovered them some time later, the mixture had matured into something rather wonderful. Lea & Perrins began selling it in the 1830s, and the sauce is still made in Worcester. It turns up in Bloody Marys, Welsh rarebit and cheese on toast, and in the Caesar salad dressing. Locals will tell you, with some weariness, how to say it: Wuss-ter-shur, give or take a syllable.
A city on the Severn with a royal ending
Worcester has a habit of turning up at the end of English civil wars. In 1651 the Battle of Worcester finished the English Civil War, when Oliver Cromwell's forces defeated Charles II's army. The young king escaped, famously hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel in Shropshire before fleeing abroad. The city's cathedral, beside the river, holds the tomb of King John, who died in 1216. It is also the burial place of Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII, whose early death in 1502 changed the course of English history. The Commandery, once a medieval hospital, served as Royalist headquarters during the battle and is now a museum of the Civil War.
Elgar's hills
The Malvern Hills rise abruptly from the plain, running about nine miles along the western edge of the county. They are the landscape that shaped Edward Elgar, born in 1857 at Broadheath near Worcester. He walked and cycled these hills, and composed much of his best-known music nearby, including the Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius. Malvern became a Victorian spa town thanks to its spring water, and the water is still bottled and sold. Charles Darwin visited for hydrotherapy, as did Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens. A. E. Housman, whose poems in A Shropshire Lad look wistfully west towards the hills, was born in Fockbury near Bromsgrove. He wrote about Shropshire without ever having properly lived there.
Porcelain, carpets and needles
Worcester porcelain began in 1751 and, as Royal Worcester, became one of the most prized names in English pottery, a favourite of royalty. The Museum of Royal Worcester in the city tells the story. Kidderminster, in the north of the county, made its name from carpets. The weaving industry boomed through the nineteenth century, and the town became synonymous with Axminster and Wilton rivals of its own. Redditch, meanwhile, was once the world's centre of needle-making and later fishing tackle. The county also has orchards and hop fields. Evesham and the Vale are famous for asparagus, plums, and market gardening. Pershore plums, especially the yellow Pershore Egg, are a local pride, and the asparagus season is celebrated with its own traditions, including a mock funeral for the end of the cutting season.
Cricket beside the cathedral
New Road in Worcester is one of the most picturesque cricket grounds anywhere. The cathedral towers behind the pavilion, and in wet winters the Severn floods the pitch, with swans occasionally taking up residence on the outfield. Worcestershire County Cricket Club, founded in 1865, has won the County Championship multiple times, with a golden era in the 1960s and 1970s and again around the late 1980s under Phil Neale. Ian Botham played here late in his career, and Graeme Hick, the Zimbabwe-born batsman, scored 405 not out for the county at Taunton in 1988. It was then the second-highest individual score in English first-class cricket, behind only Archie MacLaren's 424 in 1895. Football is more modest. Kidderminster Harriers and Worcester City fly the flag, and Kidderminster's FA Trophy win in 1987 remains a high point.