Slow Food Anglia and Kings Lynn Festival 2017

The first Slow Food Anglia food and drink festival to be held in partnership with Kings Lynn and West Norfolk Council will be held over two days on the 27th and 28th of May 2017 in the Tuesday Market Place in the centre of Kings Lynn, this is the second Bank holiday in May that year. As well as having a wide range of local food producers and also street food from local groups the Slow food Anglia festival in Lynn will also include a strong educational element concentrating the history of the food that was part of the Lynn’s historical tradition.
In the middle ages the  Hanseatic league  was formed, it was a northern European group of countries that was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and their market towns with Kings Lynn being part of the league for several centuries. The league stretched from the Baltic to the north sea and was in being from the 15th to the early 19th Century and ensured that member towns and cities became prosperous and semi autonomous entities within their countries.
Kings Lynn is now the last town in England to still have Hanseatic buildings and it also hold a Hanseatic festival in the town each summer to commemorate the history of the town during that time.

Slow Food Anglia was approached by Kings Lynn and West Norfolk council earlier this year to see if we would be interested in holding a festival in the town in 2017, after meeting with the council we agreed to hold a festival with up to 50 local artisan food and drink producers next May.
The after several meetings we decided along with the council that an ideal place to hold the festival would be the main Tuesday market place in the very centre of the town which dates back many centuries, it is now a large open square with many beautiful Georgian buildings and is at the very centre of the life of the town.
For this first Slow Food Anglia festival we plan to use the area of the square near to the main high street and this is also only a few hundred yards from the quayside and the north sea, it will be mainly local small traders for Norfolk and across East Anglia, but we have also invited Slow Food members from Holland and Germany as these countries were also important members of the Hanseatic league in the middle ages.