Wakefield Rhubarb Festival 2023: All the best photos as Yorkshire vegetable crop is celebrated

The winter food and drink festival celebrates the Rhubarb Triangle, a nine-square-mile area of farmland between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell that has been famous for producing ‘forced’ rhubarb – a vegetable native to Siberia – since the early 19th century.

The industry peaked in the 1930s, when there were even special trains to transport the crop to London and around 90 per cent of the world’s forced rhubarb originated from the Triangle.

Growers include David Tomlinson, now 80. whose family have had a forcing shed on their Pudsey farm since the 1900s. He has seen the trade come full circle, from the Rhubarb Special train days of the 1940s to it falling out of fashion before becoming popular again as a luxury ingredient beloved by top chefs such as James Martin and Tommy Banks, the latter of whom Tomlinsons supplies.