When Worcester was the place to fish for 'lamperns'

For several centuries, up until the middle of the 20th, gastronomic experts agreed there was no place like Worcester for lamperns, which were caught in the murky waters of the Severn. 

The lampern looks like a cross between an eel and a grass snake, about as thick as a man’s thumb and a foot long when fully grown. The season habitually began in October when the lamperns were carried up on the floodtides and lasted until February or March, when they disappeared again until the autumn.

A rather rickety old house in Severn Street in Victorian times. Image courtesy CFOW

They were snared by much the same method as eels, in tall wicker baskets called putcheons, embedded in the mud where the river runs deeper.

Lamperns are really a form of river lamprey, but experts who have tasted both say there is no comparison and Worcester-potted lamperns were once delicacies known all over the world.

South Quay, Worcester in 1926 before the warren of narrow riverside streets were demolished

Scores of fishermen in the city, many of whom lived in the slum areas just off South Quay, gained their livelihoods this way, but by 1936 there were only three left, all members of Joe Jenkins’ family, which lived in Seven Street.

The SS Atlanta unloading on South Quay, Worcester in 1900, the last vessel to dock directly from the coast

“Lampern Joe”, as he was known, told a Berrow’s Journal reporter: “Lamperns are still popular with those who know about them, but the majority of Worcester folk seem to have forgotten what tasty fish they are. Yet they are cheap. For a shilling you can buy one and a half pound. They don’t know what they are missing.”

Occupants of Number 6 Court, Severn Street during the 1947 floods. It is likely “Lampern Joe” Jenkins family would have occupied similar accommodation

In fact when Joseph Wood, the builder responsible for so many of Worcestershire’s great Victorian buildings, held his sumptuous mayoral breakfast banquet in November 1860 – which occupied not only the Assembly Room but also the Council Chamber of the Guildhall – as well as six joints of roast beef, six roast turkeys, two peacocks, three boar’s heads and six dishes of lobster, the menu featured 12 pots of lamperns.

Remarkably, the Severn has also been known – in times very long gone – for another “delicacy”, its water.

Time warp image of The Promenade alongside the river at Worcester from the Cathedral to South Quay taken in 1910

es, you read that right, the mucky brown flow was once the prime drinking source for Worcester’s citizens.

When writer Thomas Baskerville visited the city in 1673, he referred to water being taken from the river by a water wheel, which pumped it into a leaden cistern “from where it serves any part of the city”. 

South Quay in 1930.The open space on the right of the photo shows that slum clearance had started

Baskerville also noted a method he had seen used no-where else in England apart from at Ely, by which fresh water was “fetched from the river upon horses in leathern bags to sell”.

Beats your Perrier in a glass bottle any day. Or maybe not.