Our Oven Story: Where It All Began
Chapter 1 | Part 1. The Friday Nights That Inspired It All
Before The Lost Kitchen, before the Long Barn, before the stone base and the sourdough and the estate kitchen garden, there was a Friday night in a Somerset forest, and a man named Gordon who had been waiting his whole working life to build a wood oven.
Gordon and his wife Katie lived in Tracebridge, a small village tucked into the Somerset countryside. Gordon had long wanted to take up woodfired baking, and when retirement came, he finally had the time to do it properly. He built a vaulted brick oven with his own hands, set up a small bakery kitchen, and began learning.
Katie brought something equally valuable: a particular gift for building community around an idea. It was Katie, more than anyone, who shaped what the Friday evenings became.
From six o'clock, you turned up with a bottle of something you liked to drink, and Gordon and Katie would cook pizzas from the oven. There was a clearing in the forest, a romantically ramshackled hut, chickens wandering in and out. It felt effortless as a diner, even though a great deal of care had been put in.
What they were doing was not street food. It was nowhere near a street, and the spirit of it had nothing to do with that world. It was closer in feel to something older and more Mediterranean: Friday evening as a celebration, friends and community gathered around a fire and a table, the countryside itself part of what made it special. At a time when the South West offered you either a pub or a white tablecloth, that sense of occasion without formality felt quietly radical. And entirely natural.
George was then working as a builder in the nearby village and became a regular. It was around that fire, in those easy, unhurried evenings, that the question kept surfacing: could this go further? Could fire and dough and good company become something more? Could this travel?
This is Chapter One of the story of The Lost Kitchen, and of the new oven we are building this year. We are going back to where it all began.
Next: George builds his first mobile oven, meets Aurora, and a gold Vauxhall Nova enters the picture.