Hampering after summer

Lifting the lid on a sturdy hamper to find cold ham and ginger beer is a summer joy. Julie Harding meets the wicker weavers who make the dream come true

No one puts on a picnic with quite as much panache as Ratty. The cold chicken Kenneth Grahame's affable and generous water vole brings to the little blue-and-white boat, alongside 'cold tongue cold ham cold beef pickled gherkins salad French rolls cress sandwiches potted meat ginger beer lemonade soda water' has companion Mole in ecstasies. "This is too much!" However, beyond the extravagances of this particular feast in The Wind in the Willows, what also sets it apart is the 'fat wicker luncheon basket' in which the edibles are encased. How much more beguiling surely than the 'parcel' protecting the sandwiches that Mr Ramsay opens and shares in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse or even the undisclosed paraphernalia at that most famous of literary picnics, in Emma on that 'very fine day' at Box Hill, during which Jane Austen chooses to explore the tense interplay between her fractious characters rather than depict wicker baskets.

If the great novelist had deigned to illustrate a pannier, it could conceivably have been a model by G. W. Scott, which had set up its fine wickerwork business in London in 1661. G. W. Scott is credited as being the inventor of the compartmentalized picnic basket we know and love today, having unveiled it at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Yet a little over a century later, with the Victorian glory days for picnicking long gone and demand for alfresco dining accessories in terminal decline, the company closed its doors, seemingly forever.