Blog: London’s lockdown kids escape to the country for farmyard fun

Part of our Schools to Market project, the Year 4 pupils were off to handpick fruit to make into their own chutneys to sell at their local Whole Foods Market or outside their school gates on July 7. 

Energy and spirits were high – this was the first school trip in nearly a year and a half.  

As we left bustling Battersea behind, the fields turned into a landscape rife for ‘I spy’ with horses, cows and crops to spot in fields. Farm animals are not everyone’s everyday sight, particularly when, ‘roughly a third of pupils haven’t left London this term and clearly even less so in lockdowns’ (Year 4 teacher)  

Macs and wellies on, the pupils quickly got stuck in filling up their punnets with juicy strawberries. Fields of fruit are a fun place to be for curious minds with one pupil proudly exclaiming ‘I’ve found the biggest strawberry I have ever seen!’ and another telling me ‘I just love the taste of strawberries…do you think the green stalk is as sweet?’.

Against a backdrop of tall rhubarb leaves which other Schools to Market schools picked earlier in the week, St Mary’s RC Primary Y4 teacher adds how ‘important it is for pupils to get out in nature, many may not have gardens and this experience is different to city parks’.  

Washing sticky hands from picking juicy fruit certainly beats the usual covid handwashing routine. Tumbling back onto the coach to London I hear a pupil say, ‘that was the best and most outdoors day ever!’ – a berry good trip all round.