The Potteries (1938, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery) by Julian Trevelyan (1910-88) shows the area's distinctive bottle kilns, only 47 of which now survive (all listed). This is also the time of JB Priestley's English Journey (1934) in which he described the Potteries as 'curiously exhilarating'. (He was also a friend of Dorothy Whipple and makes an appearance in Random Commentary.) Margaret Drabble followed in Priestley's footsteps and wrote an excellent article about her Potteries journey.

Commemorative pottery has been always been good for business in the Staffordshire Potteries, the amalgamation of the six towns (not five, as in Arnold Bennett's 1902 novel) made famous by Josiah Wedgwood and his successors. This photo shows Wedgwood mugs and teapots made for the 1937 coronation; at the moment the company is selling its 2023 coronation mugs.

Last year, Tessa Traeger began working with The World of Interiors to make "pictures of food that would reflect the themes of the magazine so that you might not at first see that it was food at all" with images that "stop you in your tracks when you turn the page." The September 2022 issue featured some of the most stunning images ever done of tomatoes which were grown specially for the shoot.

Tessa Traeger's photography covers an exceptional range of subjects which, in addition to food, still life, and people, includes travel, gardens and atmospheric landscapes. This is Herefordshire, the location of Fern Verrow, a biodynamic farm which produces vegetables and flowers. Tessa Traeger's photographs illustrate the Fern Verrow book, a favourite of Nigel Slater, which was published in 2015. 

Following a commission in 2000 from the National Portrait Gallery to photograph important British horticulturalists for its collection, Tessa Traeger photographed over fifty influential gardeners, garden history writers, plant finders, garden designers and artists. This is Joy Larkcom (b.1937) who researched and introduced a huge diversity of Chinese and Japanese greens to the UK, having seen how well they lend themselves to being grown as low energy winter crops.

Tessa Traeger transformed food photography during the sixteen years she worked on British Vogue with cookery writer Arabella Boxer; she is widely acknowledged to have raised the subject of photographic food still life to the status of art. Their book A Visual Feast (1991) is just that, a mix of witty food 'collages' (a 1975 example above), artfully arranged fresh ingredients and textured semi-abstract compositions. 

This week we celebrate the work of Tessa Traeger who, at the age of 85, is still adding to her body of exceptionally beautiful photographic work. She is known for creating timeless images of an intensely personal and original quality. In the 1990s she began working in the mountainous Ardèche region of France to record the life of the people who live there and the food they produce. This culminated in a book and exhibition entitled Voices of the Vivarais.