THE sun shone upon the crowds that flocked to the Salisbury Food & Drink Festival on Sunday.

There was a mixture of food, drink, music, demonstrations, tasters and entertainment and even a visit from some Buddhist monks.

The festival in the Market Place was the culmination of a week of events that took place in the city and the surrounding countryside.

At Sunday’s popular food market professional chef demonstrations included lessons from Christine Wallace, 2013 Great British Bake Off finalist, Monica Price, national representative for the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, who cooked recipes from the Co-operative Food magazine and Jeff the Chef, a professional chef of over 50 years, who has just returned from a round-the-world gourmet trip.

During the week people had the chance to join River Cottage’s foraging expert John Wright on his Food Foraging Walk, enjoy Cocktail Hour at The Cosy Club and listen to a talk from Thane Prince, a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and expert from the BBC show Big Allotment Challenge.

Lucy Rouse, who helped organise the festival, said: “It went really well, we had about 9,000 people at the event during the course of the day and lots of the stallholders sold out. In addition many of the ticketed events during the week were very popular with Thane Prince from the Big Allotment Challenge proving to be a big hit.”