At first glance, it may seem quite remarkable that a small stone fruit could inspire such devotion.
Yet in the Worcestershire town of Pershore, nestled between the River Avon and the rich orchards of the Vale of Evesham, the plum is far more than a seasonal crop. It is part of Pershore’s identity – rooted in centuries of farming, family businesses and a horticultural heritage that made this area famous across Britain. In fact, it is one of just a few places in the UK with a plum named after it.
The Pershore Plum Festival is one of those gloriously British events that starts with a piece of fruit and somehow ends up involving motorbikes, classic cars, cooking demonstrations, markets, live music, horse-racing history, mascots in giant plum suits, seriously strong homemade liquor and 20,000 visitors descending on this Worcestershire market town dressed in plum colours.
Every August, Pershore turns purple and yellow for its month-long Plum Festival, when shop windows, market stalls, pubs and café menus fill with plum-themed treats designed to delight even the most seasoned foodie. But, as festival co-chair Alan Clark is quick to point out, the celebrations run deeper than the fruit itself. ‘It’s not all about the plum,’ he says. ‘It’s about the historical and horticultural heritage of the town.’
And yet, somehow, it is also entirely about the plum. In Pershore, the phrase ‘Pershore Plum’ refers not to a single fruit but to three distinct varieties: the Pershore Yellow Egg, the Pershore Purple – known locally as the Purple Egg – and the rarer Pershore Emblem, a darker purple variety less familiar beyond the Vale.
The plum that won the war
Next year will mark a particularly significant plum milestone. In 2027, organisers will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Pershore Yellow Egg, with plans already underway for commemorative events involving descendants of the family linked to its discovery.
The story began in nearby Tiddesley Wood in 1827, when George Crooke, landlord of the Butchers Arms in Church Street, discovered the unusual yellow plum growing wild. ‘It looks exactly like a small yellow egg,’ Alan says. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
George’s son Thomas later cultivated the fruit, helping spread it across the Vale, where it became one of Britain’s best-known cooking plums – and, according to locals, was the plum that ‘won the First World War’.
Its importance lay in its remarkable sugar density. ‘It travelled really well and was packed with energy for the soldiers,’ explains festival co-chair Angela Taylor. ‘It kept them alive, really.’ The plums were turned into jams, dense puddings and rich fruit cakes sturdy enough to survive transportation to France, becoming an important wartime food source for troops on the front line.
‘It was a lot of bang for their buck on energy levels,’ as Alan puts it.
By the late-Victorian era, the Pershore Yellow Egg had earned a national reputation as one of the country’s finest culinary plums. Sharp and almost austere when eaten raw, it transformed in the kitchen into golden jams, crimson preserves and deeply flavoured puddings. At the height of the trade, orchards stretched across Worcestershire in almost every direction. Railway wagons laden with fruit departed daily for Birmingham, London and the industrial north – there was even a train known simply as The Pershore Plum. Seasonal workers arrived in their thousands to help bring in the harvest, turning the Vale each summer into something approaching a rural gold rush.
Even today, many residents remember grandparents bottling plums in heavy glass jars or stirring steaming pans of jam in hot kitchens at the height of August. In Pershore, the plum is woven not only through the town’s economy and landscape, but through its collective memory too.
Retired farmer and grower Ed Spiers recalls picking plums as a young teenager to help his father.
‘I remember one morning, I had five wasp stings on my fingers through grabbing the plums. I can recall one of the local farmers saying he wanted to go into plum-growing, and some of the old timers said: “Just be ready. You might go several years before you put a ladder up to a tree”, because the frost used to catch the blossom and the fruit couldn’t set.’
Talking blossom, this has become a challenge for Pershore Plum Festival organisers. Each year they celebrate the Blossom Trail, but due to global warming, the blossom now comes a month earlier than it did 40 years ago, so organisers encourage plum pickers to freeze their fruit ready to make their all-important plum products for the August plum month.
A plum-lover, Ed knows exactly how he likes to eat his Pershore plum. ‘My favourite is the Pershore Purple, or we always called the Purple Egg which is great stewed.
‘I love to eat mine with ice-cream, custard or double cream. My fridge is always full of them in summer!’
The Pershore Purple Plum, originally known as Martin’s seedling arrived in 1877, thanks to Walter Martin from Drakes Broughton who crossed the Purple Diamond Plum with the Rivers Early Prolific Plum.
Whereas these two plums are 19th-century, the Pershore Emblem plum – a seedling of the Purple Pershore variety – is a modern discovery, which was developed by local grower Ged Witts in his Worcestershire allotment in 2000. It differs from its historic cousins as it is primarily a dessert plum with sweet, golden flesh, rather than a strictly culinary fruit.
So how has Pershore transformed a humble plum into one of Worcestershire’s most joyful celebrations?
The modern festival began around 30 years ago when local people decided the town’s plum-growing heritage deserved celebrating properly. It changed from a one-day event on the August Bank Holiday Monday to a month-long festival in 2008. But Pershore’s celebratory relationship with plums stretches back further.
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Harvest celebrations and plum shows were once central to life in the Vale, and apparently a 1920 poster boldly described Pershore’s event as ‘The Largest Plum Show on Earth’. More than a century later, the town is still proudly making the same claim in spirit if not scale.
‘We’ve tried to find factual evidence of that,’ admits Angela. ‘People say that’s what it was called – but no one can prove it. We’ve just used it.’
So how has she and her fellow volunteers managed to grow it to the size and popularity it is today? ‘Because we’ve made it fun,’ Angela says. ‘So many places grow plums. But not many people can say they have got plums named after their town. And nobody does with them what we do.’
That means the celebrity plum mascots called Prunella and Egbert wandering the streets, high-fiving children, ‘although Prunella only has four fingers!’ adds Alan. It means a ‘Plum Posse’ for local schoolchildren dressed in purple and yellow who help Prunella and Egbert judge the Shop Window competition; it means a best-dressed biker competition held in memory of a beloved committee member and it means a town-wide transformation into shades of plum purple and egg-yolk yellow.
‘August is Plum Festival month,’ says Alan. ‘The shops start turning purple and yellow. I even get to spend weekends dressed in the giant Prunella costume, which has required icepacks in the hot weather!’
The roll out of plummy events
‘At one time Pershore had its own local racecourse,’ Angela explains. ‘The feature race was called the Land O’ Plums Chase — equivalent to the Cheltenham Gold Cup. So, we managed to revive the historic race title, complete with plum-themed races and crowds dressed in purple.’
The Pershore Plum Festival Race Meeting takes place on Wednesday, July 22, at Worcester Racecourse, marking the start of this years Pershore Plum festivities.
There’s a huge Bike Nite attracting up to 800 motorcycles, classic cars will line the grounds of Pershore Abbey, live music will spill across Broad Street and cafés, pubs and bakeries will compete to produce the most inventive plum-inspired creations.
There will be artisan markets, family entertainment in Abbey Park, cookery demonstrations, and charity events in the delightfully named Plum Alley.
Yet what makes the festival so distinctive is not simply its programme of events but the sense of ownership the town feels towards it. Pershore does not stage the festival for tourists alone; it stages it for itself. Schools, community groups, traders and volunteers all play their part, and the atmosphere is less polished commercial event than affectionate civic tradition.
‘The festival belongs to everybody,’ says Angela. ‘People genuinely care about it because it reflects who we are as a town. It just keeps growing every year,’ says Angela. ‘For whatever reason, this small fruit captures the imagination.’
But as the festival has grown, there have been more problems to overcome and creatively solve. There are road closures, safety regulations, ambulances, sponsorship drives and months of planning meetings. The event costs around £35,000 to stage annually.
But the organisers speak about it less like a committee and more like an extended family.
‘We’re all volunteers,’ says Angela. ‘It is a lot of hard work, but we all get along, I guess we are a plum family.’ Alan was persuaded to join after attending the festival.
‘While I was enjoying listening to some live music, my wife said: “You really should be helping them”. The next morning, I was up at 5.30am doing logistics – and that was me in.’
More than fruit
Pershore Plum Festival is also becoming a way of preserving a disappearing landscape. Across the Vale of Evesham, traditional orchards have steadily vanished under housing developments.
‘It’s so sad,’ says Angela. ‘This is why the work of the Vale Landscape Heritage Trust is so important. They rescue old orchards and plant new ones.’
Festival organisers now work with local schools and community orchards to plant new plum trees and keep Pershore’s horticultural heritage alive.
And perhaps that explains why the festival resonates so strongly.
Beneath the costumes, cakes and cocktails sits something deeper: a celebration of place, memory and community effort.
‘It’s like a ripple effect,’ Angela reflects. ‘You’re celebrating history, community and hard work – all from this little humble plum.’
That deep-rooted connection is exactly what the festival seeks to celebrate. Running throughout August and culminating in the famous Plum Fayre and Farmers’ Market over the August Bank Holiday weekend, the 2026 festival promises another gloriously purple (and yellow) takeover of the town.
Shop windows bloom with plum-themed displays, bunting dances above the Georgian streets and the scent of jam, cakes and chutneys drifts through the town centre and children dressed as plums weave between market stalls, Morris dancers will perform and visitors gather with paper bags full of fruit grown just beyond the town’s edges.
There’s also a plum-themed golf day, a 10km fun run with many purple-dressed runners and even a plum pooches dog show! For a few weeks every year, Pershore gives itself over entirely to the plum.
That pride has tangible benefits too.
During festival season, Pershore’s independent shops, cafés and restaurants enjoy a welcome influx of visitors, while the event shines a spotlight on the area’s growers and producers at a time when British horticulture faces mounting pressures.
‘Pershore’s plums are woven into the identity of the town, and the festival is a wonderful way to celebrate that rich history while bringing the whole community together,’ says festival sponsor Tom Tarver, managing director of Nigel Poole & Partners.
‘It is a truly iconic celebration of the town’s heritage, character and famous purple pride. It is always fantastic to see the streets full of colour, local businesses thriving, and residents and visitors alike enjoying one of Pershore’s most treasured traditions.’
Part of the pleasure of the festival lies in discovering that there is no such thing as simply ‘a plum’.
Plums appear in almost everything during festival month.
Plum crumble and plum chutney are obvious staples, but more adventurous creations include plum sausages, plum beer, plum ice-cream, plum pizza, plum cocktails and the intriguingly named plum jerkum — a potent fermented drink once popular among local orchard workers.
Long before artisan gin bars and craft cider festivals, Worcestershire farmers were brewing plum alcohol in barns and outbuildings across the Vale.
‘Everybody has a favourite plum recipe,’ laughs Angela. ‘And usually, a strong opinion about how everybody else should make theirs.’
Some towns are best known for their castles or cathedrals.
Pershore has built its identity around a cooking plum – and somehow has made both the town and fruit magnificent..
pershoreplumfestival.org.uk
info@pershoreplumfestival.org.uk
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