Beth Cullen Kerridge put her career as a sculptor on hold to support her husband’s struggle to become a Michelin-starred chef. Now the tables have turned
Back in 2005 artist Beth Cullen Kerridge and her husband Tom faced a now-or-never moment. They had been married five years, Tom working as a chef with Gary Rhodes among others and Beth the assistant to the great British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. The plan when they first got together after a swept-off-their-feet romance was for Tom to earn enough money cooking for Beth to have her own studio. They moved to Norfolk in 2004 to try to make that happen but the money was not quite enough for it to work, and they felt they were going a little crazy out near Norwich. The choice in 2005 was either for Tom, at 33, to get a work-all-hours job as head chef in a London hotel, or to go it alone. The turning point in that decision was a roundabout in Stoke-on-Trent, Beth’s home town.
She was commissioned to do four sculptures on a traffic island, and with the money, plus “the help of an army of friends and family” and a bank loan, they decided to set up a pub restaurant, the Hand and Flowers in Marlow. “Just really,” she says now, “so we could begin to make our own decisions.”
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