The pub has a staggering list of awards and credentials, including being the only UK pub certified by the Soil Association; creator of the first fish policy to gain Marine Conservation Society approval; London Dining Pub winner in the Good Pub Guide three times; and winner of an RSPCA Ethical Business Award. Owner Geetie Singh received an MBE in 2009.

I wondered whether the Duke of Cambridge’s critical acclaim may have gone to its head and turned it into a pretentious gastropub (or that it might be so evangelically organic that I’d feel out of place not dressed from head-to-toe in hemp).

Happily, this was not the case at all. Being several hundred metres off Essex Road means the clientele has made a conscious effort to be there. Mismatched tables and chairs, candle-lighting and friendly staff make it cosy and welcoming, and I was fascinated by the shelves packed with homemade jars of pickles and preserves.

The pub’s commitment to locally-grown and organic produce is impressive: 80% of fresh produce comes from the Home Counties, and only those ingredients which are in season are used. Tea, coffee, chocolate and nuts are Fair Trade; wine, beer and soft drinks are organic; and the pub buys and uses entire animals, wasting nothing at all. Lesser-known, sustainably-caught fish like gurnard and pollack are preferred and only filtered tap water is served.

But something I was particularly interested to hear about was the Duke of Cambridge’s commitment to its local community. Chefs from the pub have trained the cooks at nearby Thornhill Primary School to create healthy menus of local produce. They have also worked with Kate Greenaway Nursery to create a community kitchen, and taught the pupils at Highbury Fields Secondary School to cook and serve healthy, organic dishes to their classmates. It’s this level of community-involvement that puts the Duke of Cambridge in a different league to some of London’s other excellent organic eateries, like Bumpkin and Daylesford Organic cafés, for me.

The pub’s insistence on seasonal produce means the menu changes twice a day, but you can download a sample menu for each season to give you an idea of the treats in store. On the menu on Thursday night was Stichelton and pear salad; duck with potatoes; sustainably-sourced mussels with white wine, cream and parsley; wild boar; quiche with Portobello mushrooms and beetroot salad and more. I plumped for crispy goose croquettes served with a spicy tomato salsa that cut through the richness of the goose perfectly. At £8-£12 for starters and £12-£22 for main courses, it is certainly not a cheap-eat. But if you’ll consider paying a premium to know where your steak or spinach came from, the D of C is definitely worth crossing the river for.

*See 4Food for articles on topics including food waste, Fairtrade food, and where to buy sustainable fish.

[My blog on TTG website, ttgdigital.com]

One of the most interesting events of WTM for me was the launch by Kuoni of the UK’s first Fair Trade-certified holiday.

Kuoni teamed up with Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa (FTTSA), which has been working to promote the importance of fair trade in tourism for a decade, in order to gain certification of all aspects of the supply chain on a 13-night South Africa package.

While the concept of fairly-traded cocoa or bananas is easy enough to comprehend, fairly-traded tourism is more complicated – which is perhaps why it’s taken until now for it to develop.

I asked FTTSA’s executive director Jennifer Seif what the Fair Trade stamp on Kuoni’s package holiday actually represents. She explained that all accommodation providers on the itinerary have been vetted to ensure their staff are paid a fair wage and have good working conditions, and that their suppliers are paid fairly.

Kuoni’s commitment to the accommodation and local ground-handlers it uses include paying 100% of its bills before a client travels, and paying cancellation fees if forced to cancel a booking. “There’s an unwritten rule that hotels don’t ask for the money, but it can be very hard on small businesses,” said Seif.

While a fair, minimum price can be put on commodities like bananas, Seif said this doesn’t work in tourism, as prices fluctuate so much. ”What we do instead is say you cannot push for a discount, and we demand a transparency so people know who is paying what,” she said.

The £2,995 price tag on Kuoni’s package also includes a $50-$60 ‘premium’ which goes into a separate fund, to be spent on socio-economic projects that benefit those involved in the supply chain. Seif hopes to soon have 20-30 operators like Kuoni bringing 5,000 clients to South Africa on this kind of Fair Trade package each year. “That’s three million rand, or about £250,000, of new money for development,” she says.

She acknowledged clients might not yet look for Fair Trade when booking their holiday. “But when they get there and hear about the Fair Trade ethos and feel good about staying there, that is when they tell their friends and the hotel benefits from word-of-mouth marketing and repeat business,” she explained.

Harriet Lamb, the UK’s executive director of The Fair Trade Foundation, said at the Kuoni/South Africa launch that consumers WILL pay more for fairly-traded holidays. “Of course people want a bargain but if you tell them these bananas -or this package holiday – is cheap because the people behind it aren’t getting a fair deal, people will pay more,” she said.

There’s a lot of cash-strapped UK consumers who right now are understandably reluctant to pay a penny more for a holiday than they absolutely have to.

But when she opened World Responsible Tourism Day on Wednesday, Harriet Lamb reminded us of how the Archbishop of York described our responsibility to support Fair Trade: “Fair trade is not charity. It’s justice”, he said.

And for the future of destinations like South Africa, where being paid fairly can be the means of a climbing out of poverty, I hope the vision of a global Fair Trade mark for tourism becomes a reality soon.

Federico Solano described a new scheme called Tour Operators Promoting Sustainability, or TOPS, for both local Latin American tourism companies and those sending customers from the UK and other countries.

After bringing together travel companies that have made a commitment to sustainable practices, the Alliance hopes to launch a group-wide marketing campaign, creating one of the world’s first networks of green-certified operators.

Twelve UK holiday companies already have contracts with the Rainforest Alliance in place, committing them to using accommodation and cruise companies that operate in a sustainable way. These include The Adventure Company, Exodus, Explore, Hands Up Holidays and Imaginative Traveller. Federico said UK companies have been among the most supportive of the Alliance’s work, and that he hopes they will all sign up to the TOPS platform.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the new TOPS project progresses, and hope to see lots more of the Rainforest Alliance on the UK travel trade circuit. Perhaps a UK consumer travel show, featuring only Rainforest Alliance partners, could be something for the not-too-distant future…

I got chance to meet a Rainforest Alliance-certified operator just yesterday. Costa Rican Horizontes Tours, which specialises in nature tours, has been working alongside the Rainforest Alliance for several years. Rodolfo Alvarez explained how the company uses certified hotels as much as possible, and how it has introduced volunteering projects, home-stays and tree-planting options to help its customers interact more with nature and with Costa Rica’s people. I won two nights at a Costa Rican yoga retreat so I hope I may get chance to go and explore the country’s wildlife for myself sometime soon!

It’s a hotel I first learnt about at World Travel Market last year, when it won the ‘best accommodation for the environment‘ category at the Responsible Tourism Awards.

As well as using 65% solar power and buying produce direct from local fishermen and farmers, one of the innovations that really stands out for me in this video is a local paper-making project, where the hotel gives shredded waste paper to local craftswomen to be turned into guest stationery – which the hotel then buys back. A perfect example of a project that is both environmentally conscious and socially beneficial! Watch the full story of how this hotel is breaking the mould in the Caribbean here.

The Bluefields Bay reserve is now a year old, and it seems that fish stocks have gone from strength to strength since my visit at the start of the year. The wardens who patrol the sanctuary are now seeing a return of sea-birds too, especially the blue pelican – which does not heed the no-fishing zone!

Click here to watch the video in full.

Click here to read my blog from January.

A Q&A with Anthony Climpson OBE, tourism manager of the New Forest

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Canoeing in the New Forest

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Exploring beyond the New Forest National Park

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Conservation volunteering in the New Forest

Strawberry mountain

I loved Chelsea Flower Show last year so was keen to go along when the Bermuda Department of Tourism invited me. Last year, most of my favourite gardens were big show gardens outdoors, but this year I made more time for the exhibitors inside the floral marquee, and found lots of interesting smaller gardens. Here’s the 10 I liked best overall this year (in no particular order):

1. The tunnel of clematis of all different shades of purple and white, created by Raymond Evison and his Guernsey Clematis team

2. A huge mountain covered in nothing but strawberries that gave off the most delicious smell – but had a strict no-picking policy

3. An intricate display of flowers tucked into every crevice of an old, gnarled tree, making it look a bit like a maypole

Tree decked in flowers

4. The Bermuda garden, which was styled around a giant stone shaped like a polo – the ‘moonstone’ which Bermudians have in their gardens to bring good luck, and often used in wedding ceremonies

5. The Tourism Malaysia garden, again created by TV-gardener James Wong, but this year inspired by the pool-gardens of urban houses in Malaysia. Malaysia deservedly took home a gold award again this year

6. The incredible jockey’s jackets crafted out of flowers by entrants in the RHS Young Chelsea Florist of the Year competition

7. The Principality of Monaco’s chic, architecture-led garden with swimming pool and decking. As I left the show at 8pm I was mesmerised by the robot pool cleaner

Jockey's jackets

8. Sri Lanka’s beautiful orchid garden. Sri Lanka also pulled off a rather impressive list of celebrity drop-ins: Bill Bailey, JLS, Rick Stein, Jane Asher and Helen Mirren

9. The exciting B&Q garden with real goldfish and a striking vertical garden, promoting  techniques for maximising urban space to grow fresh produce

10. The controversial Failte Island ‘sky garden’ (the one that was lifted into the air by a crane every so often). I didn’t get chance to see it aloft but I loved the dense grasses and foliage of the garden, and let’s face it, it would be super-cool to dine in a ‘hanging Eden’.