Curating a festival for four decades of British cool, in the open air, is a risky business, especially if it is not music focused and aims at family appeal. Situated on the edge of the South Downs, normally used for hosting horse racing, the venue rolled out an easy charm; a mix made for designers, music lovers and nostalgia seekers; many dressed up in clothes older visitors had in their attics and younger ones bought in charity shops, market stalls or village fetes.

My family spent a day hanging out, dilettantely poking around stalls, meeting friends, while the music wafted across from the perimeter grandstands, walking down the movie-set, instant-retro main street and stopping at victualling spots.  Bars offering Festival of Britain food and drink, Abbey Road studios music snapshots rubbed shoulders with stores like Cath Kidson, with her fifties style household products. Star of India providing curry takeaways faster than you can pay for them, Fortnum & Mason serving out high-class teas with tables set looking at the Leisure Dome and the Veuve Clicquot champagne garden providing ample opportunity for people watching.

The vintage cars made for a great entrée, including the cars that never went mass market, like the Frisky. Caravan culture made its presence felt with making do, camping for the liberated post war working classes a reminder of popular cultures contribution to British cool, and British fashion’s street credentials. As we ambled around ephemera from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, I speculated that once something becomes cool it has reached a tipping point. Many years later it’s recycled and an era is recalled as part of its memory. Is that where nostalgia creeps in? Things make a much more immediate impact on us than political or social stories because we can touch them. Clothes, motor scooters and vases that evoke personal memories  become time markers.

Vintage Goodwood reminded me of how much popular culture has contributed to the rich diversity of design we have in this country; of how the visual world is really a kind of language, of how its makes us feel inclusive and its part in our national identity. It welds us into a broader family of American & European culture that I remain grateful to be a part of.

A big thanks to Wayne and the Hemingway family.  I hope you stage it again. There is lots more gold to mine along this yellow brick road.

It appears Darwin can shed light, or rather add fuel to the fire, to the debate about why kitchens are important, how they have helped humans jump up the evolutionary scale and explain why they are spaces on the ascendance, even though people cook less.

In this book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human, Richard Wrangman explains how cooking has made us more intelligent and sociable in evolutionary terms; cooking helps us have better sex, promotes (useful) division of labour and contributes to the concept of well-organised, domestic households.

His theory starts off with how fire shifted our diet from raw food (bad for us, not good, as recent fads suggest) to cooked food. Horses and cows, for example, need to keep eating constantly and have no time for leisure. Even hunter-gatherers were tied to a cycle of hunting and starvation, which was time consuming and distracting, and occasionally fatal. Agricultural man could not digest uncooked grains and most fresh fruits don’t store, so we would not have developed diverse diet or progressed beyond primitive lifestyles without cooking.

Cooked food requires less energy to digest and leaves us with time to pursue mental activities like education and craft skills. With a more efficient digestive system, our brains were able to grow bigger and needed less bulky organs to support a large brain size.

The increasing ratio of brain size to body is explained by more effective cooking. The first sharp increase of brain size was due to shifting our diets from foliage to roots – which have more carbohydrates – around 5 – 7 million years ago. The second brain expansion, around 1.8 to I million years ago, was due to eating more meet, which was only possible due to more effective digestion.

The food quest is key to our evolutionary success, although ironically this is now in doubt. There is the prospect of our kids living shorter lives due to our perversion of the food supply industry (see my blog post on Michael Pollen’s book Food Rules: In Defence of Food), the lack of physical work and disregard for sociability.

To end on a positive note, in defence of kitchens, Wrangham says that cooking softens food, which enables us to eat more efficiently, hence allowing us to spend more time working at tasks not related to survival. It also supports a division of labour that creates a well-balanced household economy whereby the hunter-gatherer women were treated well, because they were needed by men to ensure functioning of the dietary system. We believe that modern man has been reconstructed, but it is clear that having a sociable place to cook and eat is a key to remaining healthy. Fast food restaurants tend to use overly rich ingredients and don’t provide you with a diet for longevity. Cooking at home, on the other hand, does and it is tailored to your own specification.

Open-plan, sociable kitchens provide support for digestion as eating is slowed down by conversation. A calm environment, with long views for instinctive relaxation and other rituals so elegantly set out by Margeret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner, discourage over-eating. Wrangham claims we learned many of the elements of sociable behaviour through the discovery of fire and developing an ability to cook. The circular argument seems complete: the more you cook, the more civilized you become. Maybe the modern kitchen is not so much the living room in which you cook, but where you become socialised or join civilisation?

“Eating in our time has gotten complicated, needlessly so.” The opening lines of Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules, remind us how to use our instincts to navigate our relationship with food. This parallels what has happened in kitchen design. We have lost touch with our basic needs. Expressed in modern folk wisdom, Pollan outlines a manual for eaters with the goal of increasing their health and enjoyment of food. It was with great interest that I attended his humorous and elegant talk at the Royal Society of Arts in London.

Familiar with much of his ideas after reading In Defence of Food, I learnt new facts such as that the average American has gained 18 lbs since the 1980’s when low fat and diet products were introduced. This is the opposite of what what was originally intended. The food industry discovered a way to sell more food by demonizing fat and replacing it with salt and sugar. They persuaded the public that diet food was good for us and we could binge as much as we liked.

Pollan says it is not just what we eat but also how we eat that is crucial. One of his food rules is to eat at a table, whenever possible, in the company of others. It reduces both greed and speed, and improves digestion and pleasure. He has summed up the job of kitchen designers in a nutshell. During the 1980s, kitchens were created where you could not have conversations because the work surfaces faced the walls, showroom spaced clad in plastic, shiny surfaces and matching doors. Domesticity was too old fashioned or simply too difficult to mass produce.

The kitchen industry needs to avoid the unintended results created by the food industry – the consumption of large quantities of food has led to large cabinetry and appliances. The focus should be on creating spaces for living, eating, prepping and cooking. Instinct tells us everything we need to know. We want to be in a room because it feels like home.

A kitchen has simple needs: modest-sized, freestanding furniture pieces for each major function (like cooking, prepping and washing up), minimal countertops, a walk-in larder and a storage cupboard or two, a decent table, access to the outdoors and panoramic eye contact. And don’t forget about a place to make a mess, have a drink, chill out, experiment, and generally behave like you live there.

So throw out your matching units, continuous counters and matching doors with repetitive handles. You have nothing to loose but convention, and everything to gain. More space, less cost, more of you in the surroundings and less of being self consciously stylish, more playing with colour and use of vintage pieces. Enjoy discovering your inner interior designer.