At GULP, we explore the world through the lens of food. The Reading Table is a gathering place where books, ideas and food come together around a shared table.
September’s edition looks at water.
"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
Water is essential to life on Earth. It appears abundant and covers approximately 70% of the Earth's surface, but it is mostly salt water, with only about 3% being fresh water.
It makes up over 60% of the human body, making hydration essential to our survival. It is also a key component in foods and many cooking methods and recipes, and plays an important role in transporting food across the world — seas, canals, steam trains and rivers all play a part.
We think about cooking with water: boiling, steaming, poaching, dissolving, diluting. We think about food that comes from water and food that lives within it — rivers, lakes and oceans as sites of nourishment, migration and extraction.
As I write this, after a rainy May followed by a scorching June, my thoughts turn towards absence and constraint, drought and scarcity, and the increasing fragility of food systems shaped by climate change and limited water supplies.
It may be clear and tasteless, but water is never neutral. It carries histories, ecologies and power. It shapes what grows, what survives, and what disappears.
In literature, water appears constantly — as myth, metaphor and material reality. It floods stories, carries bodies, and signals transformation. From river journeys and coastal landscapes to drought-stricken fields and submerged worlds, writers have long used water to explore survival, abundance and loss.
For this gathering, we invite you to bring literature in its widest sense. It might be a novel, a poem, a scientific text, a cookbook, a recipe card, a fragment of folklore, or a text discovered by chance. It might describe cooking, fishing, farming, flooding, thirst, or something else.
Together, we will share extracts, stories and reflections while gathering around a grazing table inspired by water.
Whether it’s The Pisces by Melissa Broder; Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield; or Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape and the Modern Cook by Pam Brunton, come and join us, and tell us what watery words have flooded your mind recently?
Hosted in GULP’s intimate dining room, The Reading Table sits somewhere between a reading group, a supper club and a cultural salon — a space for curiosity, conversation and shared appetite.
Places are limited.
£65 per person, including drinks and an inspired grazing table
At GULP, we explore the world through the lens of food. The Reading Table is a gathering place where books, ideas and food come together around a shared table.
September’s edition looks at water.
"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
Water is essential to life on Earth. It appears abundant and covers approximately 70% of the Earth's surface, but it is mostly salt water, with only about 3% being fresh water.
It makes up over 60% of the human body, making hydration essential to our survival. It is also a key component in foods and many cooking methods and recipes, and plays an important role in transporting food across the world — seas, canals, steam trains and rivers all play a part.
We think about cooking with water: boiling, steaming, poaching, dissolving, diluting. We think about food that comes from water and food that lives within it — rivers, lakes and oceans as sites of nourishment, migration and extraction.
As I write this, after a rainy May followed by a scorching June, my thoughts turn towards absence and constraint, drought and scarcity, and the increasing fragility of food systems shaped by climate change and limited water supplies.
It may be clear and tasteless, but water is never neutral. It carries histories, ecologies and power. It shapes what grows, what survives, and what disappears.
In literature, water appears constantly — as myth, metaphor and material reality. It floods stories, carries bodies, and signals transformation. From river journeys and coastal landscapes to drought-stricken fields and submerged worlds, writers have long used water to explore survival, abundance and loss.
For this gathering, we invite you to bring literature in its widest sense. It might be a novel, a poem, a scientific text, a cookbook, a recipe card, a fragment of folklore, or a text discovered by chance. It might describe cooking, fishing, farming, flooding, thirst, or something else.
Together, we will share extracts, stories and reflections while gathering around a grazing table inspired by water.
Whether it’s The Pisces by Melissa Broder; Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield; or Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape and the Modern Cook by Pam Brunton, come and join us, and tell us what watery words have flooded your mind recently?
Hosted in GULP’s intimate dining room, The Reading Table sits somewhere between a reading group, a supper club and a cultural salon — a space for curiosity, conversation and shared appetite.
Places are limited.
£65 per person, including drinks and an inspired grazing table
