In 2019 Walkers launched two flavours of potato crisps: BBQ Pulled Pork and Spicy Sriracha. These were said to be “inspired by street food” and the advert showed Gary Lineker manning a stall selling them, like some rare, tasty delicacy. The idea of “street food”-flavoured crisps is the final indication, if we needed one, that British society has forgotten what street food actually is.
Eating on the street, as Charlie Taverner writes in his richly researched history of London street food, is now seen as “a consumer choice”. In modern Britain street food has become a trend: a series of exotic flavours that can apparently be slapped on anything to give it a bit of colour, even a packet of crisps. This is the opposite of what street food was for hundreds of years, when it was a way for working populations to buy all of their everyday essentials.
For centuries street food in London was how people on low incomes bought their daily bread as well as their fruit and veg and nearly everything else. As recently as the 1930s there were as many as 30,000 street pedlars in the city. There was nothing trendy about it.
The startling argument of Taverner’s book is that street food in London changed very little from the late 16th century all the way up to the First World War and its aftermath. Each transaction might be tiny: “two penny-worth of pears” or “sixpence” of oranges. But added together the total trade in street food was immense. In the 1840s the journalist Henry Mayhew calculated that at Billingsgate street sellers bought most of the plaice, mackerel, fresh herring, sprats, flounders, dabs, mussels, cockles, periwinkles and whelks. The street sellers also bought more than half of the apples and strawberries and hazelnuts for sale at London’s green markets.
Taverner suggests that the life of a woman “hawking” apples on the street in Victorian London would have been very similar to her equivalent in Shakespeare’s time. The technology, the product and the customers were basically the same. The cover of Street Food features a mesmerising photograph of a female apple seller on Cheapside in the late 19th century. The only tools she had to ply her trade were a giant basket for the apples and her own voice for drumming up customers.
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This is a slim book but what makes it compelling is the accumulation of human details about the lives of street sellers. One of the best chapters covers the range of street cries and “come buys” used by food sellers — cries that endured across the centuries so much that they became like folk tunes, as with the cockles and mussels alive alive oh in the Irish song Molly Malone.
Taverner explains that some of the cries related to the quality of the food: “dainty pears” or “chestnuts all ’ot”. Some street cries emphasised price: “penny a lot, fine russets” or “beautiful whelks, a penny a lot”. Others highlighted the place a food came from: “Yorkshire muffins”, “Newcastle salmon”. But the universal cry was simply “come buy”, extended by one Victorian street butcher to an unsubtle “Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy!”
Taverner gives a vivid sense of what a precarious existence it was being a street food seller. These tradespeople were in a constant battle to keep their prices low enough that they wouldn’t put off their customers but high enough to make a profit. And they were also often battling the authorities. Hawkers were charged in the courts with obstructing the pavements, breaking the Sabbath by selling food on a Sunday and with tempting customers to gamble (some street food stalls offered games of dice or marbles along with the food).
Street food sellers were also regularly accused — then, as now — of selling unwholesome food. There were cases of hawkers selling rotten fish and old oranges that had been boiled to make them look fresh again. But some of the accusations were unfair. In 1897 a costermonger called Henry Nathan was charged by Thames police with selling bananas that were “bad and unfit for food”. He had to explain to the court that just because bananas were turning brown on the outside did not mean that the fruit on the inside was bad to eat. Taverner suggests that bananas were such a novelty then that the officer who charged Nathan might never have seen one before.
From a modern perspective it’s startling to learn how much of what was sold on the street represented what we would now consider healthy rather than fast food. Asparagus and broccoli; watercress and kale: all these and more were sold on the streets.
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In the end London street food was mostly killed off after the Second World War. The old customer base vanished from the streets into cars and Tubes and buses and the stallholders couldn’t compete with the new supermarkets. If the book has a fault, it’s that Taverner races through this part of the story in just a few pages; I would have liked to have heard more of what became of the old street sellers.
There are still places where street food is every bit as vital as it once was in London, such as India, where there are at least four million street sellers. They are, Taverner writes, “the chief distributors of fresh fruit and vegetables”. This way of life, he suggests, has pluses as well as minuses. Londoners, he argues, are “safer” than they were during the centuries when they bought so much of their food on the streets. But the downside is that some of the “liveliness” of the capital is gone — a liveliness that is still found in the street food of Mumbai. In India, unlike in Britain, street food is still something essential and alive rather than a gimmick to sell crisps.
Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London by Charlie Taverner
Oxford University Press £30 pp256
