1. ENGLISH 4 LISTENING
FOOD
LUDLOW
CITTASLOW
FROM : BBC2, COUNTRYFILE, SUNDAY 19 MARCH 2006.
Presented by John Craven, Countryfile reports on the latest rural and environmental stories. Sunday, 11.30am BBC
Two.
Ludlow in south Shropshire is the UK's first 'slow town'
and part of 'Cittaslow' – a network of towns dedicated
to quality of life. Mayor Graeme Kidd works to improve
life for everyone in the town by co-ordinating local
projects, from curbing light pollution to improving
water quality. Cittaslow is an international movement
that grew from Slow Food in Italy. It's all about
traditional, high quality food and drink. Martin Harris of
the nearby Butford Farm shows Adam Henson his
local Three Counties Perry – a kind of pear cider that
Slow Food has protected from extinction.
1 Adam : If this sounds familiar to you then you might want to think about moving to Ludlow. It’s been
2 made the UK base of an international organisation with a very special aim : to encourage people to
3 slow down and enjoy themselves.
4 Graeme Kidd, Mayor of Ludlow : Well, here in Ludlow we’re the first Cittaslow in the UK, which
5 means we’re part of an Italian network of Cittaslow towns. Literally, it means ‘slow city’ and we’re the
6 headquarters of Cittaslow.
7 Adam : So, what does that mean in practice?
8 Graeme Kidd : Well, it means at the town council we do what we ought to be doing, which is working
9 with different groups in our community to improve the quality of life for everyone in and around
10 Ludlow. There is a set of 60 goals that we live up to. It covers a whole bunch of things. I’ll talk about
11 some of them if you like. One of the things we do, Adam, is buy all our streetlight electricity from a
12 green energy supplier and we’ve also got a Ludlow campaign starting using these light bulbs. The idea
13 is to get people to replace their normal high energy and incandescent bulbs with these fluorescent type
14 lights. It makes sense. You save money and particularly with electricity costs going up you can save
15 quite a bit of money and also energy will be generally greener. It’s simple. Well, this is the healthy
16 eating café in our Leisure Centre in Ludlow an it’s one of the practical projects which Cittaslow has
17 got together. We basically talked to people who run it and said ‘can we have local produce and
18 healthier options on sale here for people coming out for a snack here after they’ve been doing a bit of
20 exercise. So, you know, quality local crisps, nice drinks here, healthy food for healthy people. Yeah,
21 pasta rather than chips.
22 One of the thing that Cittaslow has focussed us on is where we have benches in and around the town.
23 You can see we have got benches here but we talked to Age Concern and a few other people and said
24 ‘Where do you need benches where we haven’t got them? And it’s actually focussed us on thinking
25 about things in a different way.
FOR MORE INFORMATION :
www.bbc.co.uk/nature/environment/programmes/countryfile
www.cittaslow.net
www.slowfood.com
www.threecountiesperry.co.uk