A Friday in Streatham, south London. Three colleagues taking a break from their work at a video production company have popped out to grab lunch at Morley’s, a fried chicken restaurant. “It was my birthday yesterday and I had a few drinks, so I feel like it’s justified,” Sarah MacKenzie laughs. Why the need to explain her choice? Placing her order over the counter for a £5.29 chicken burger meal with chips and a soft drink — her first lunch as a 36-year-old — she says she knows “dirty chicken shops” have certain “grotty” connotations.
Claire Ali, 29, her colleague, agrees: “It’s not somewhere I’d tell people I go,” she says, before enthusing about how good it smells and ordering a £6.29 box deal of a burger, a piece of chicken, two wings, fries and a soft drink. “The price here is amazing. This is such good value.”
It is 1.30pm. The shop has enough seating for just 12 people and is nearly full with GCSE pupils having just finished an exam, plus a mother with a baby in a buggy and two young men who have come from the mosque after Friday prayers. The atmosphere is unmistakably ebullient — unusually for London, strangers are talking to each other. “You always meet people in a chicken shop and know you’ll get good banter,” says MacKenzie, who is from Glasgow but has lived in London for three years. “It was a culture shock when I came here. After a night out, I was, like, where’s the chippie? Where’s the kebab shop? Everything was a chicken shop.”
This corner of southwest London has an embarrassment of chicken shops. Morley’s is one of 12 on Streatham High Road — the most of any single street in London according to Local Data Company (LDC), which specialises in analysing business locations. Streatham High Road then runs straight into London Road, terminating in Croydon, a thoroughfare with a further 17 chicken shops. This means that, without turning left or right, you can walk for 3.8 miles and pass an astonishing 29 chicken shops including Chicken World, Chicken Cottage, two KFCs, Nando’s, Chicken & Drinks, Chicken Maxx, Chicken Valley, Mr Peri’s and three separate Morley’s.
While this may be the road with the most outlets, other corners of the country boast an even greater concentration of poultry purveyors. Huddersfield has one chicken shop for every 976 residents; in Blackpool it is one for every 897, LDC says.
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Many people think fast food equals burgers, but this image bears little relation to economic reality. In the 12 months to May, Brits spent £4.58 billion on chicken in fast food outlets according to Kantar, a research firm that tracks the spending of 30,000 families in the country. This is the equivalent of £70 for every person in Britain, hugely exceeding the £1.98 billion we spent on beef from a fast food place.
For many, these figures are a damning indictment of the state of Britain’s high streets. Fried chicken has been blamed variously for lowering the tone of town centres, creating rubbish on the streets, facilitating gang violence and exacerbating Britain’s obesity problem. During the election campaign, Wes Streeting, then Labour’s shadow health secretary, specifically named KFC for “taking the mick” by challenging a council trying to stop a new restaurant “so that they can pump fried chicken out by school gates”.
Few politicians question the health credentials of a fish and chip shop. But their numbers are in decline, whereas chicken shops, especially the slicker chains, are expanding fast. In the past six years, two American brands have entered the UK market: Wingstop and Popeyes, both aiming to open about 350 restaurants each.
Describing its product as Louisiana fried chicken, Popeyes has 37 shops, plus a large business on Deliveroo, and is on track to post an annual turnover of £150 million despite being here for only two and a half years. Tom Crowley, 50, boss of the UK division, tells me: “The reason we came [to the UK] was there was this big explosion of chicken growth here. We definitely saw whitespace in chicken. Wherever we’ve opened — from Glasgow to Plymouth and Cardiff to Cambridge — we’ve done well. That gives us confidence.”
To find out why there is “whitespace in chicken” and how chicken shops colonised our high streets, I spent a couple of days visiting the 29 outlets on that single road in Streatham, speaking to customers and owners and eating a lot of wings and strips. I even put in a short shift at one shop to see how a piece of raw meat is transformed into Britain’s most popular fast food.
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“Fried chicken is very zeitgeisty. It’s very now,” says Jenny Packwood, the chief corporate affairs officer for KFC Europe, the company that started this trend when it opened its first restaurant in the UK in Preston, Lancashire, in 1965. There are now 1,035 KFCs in the UK and Ireland, making it the largest of all the chicken chains.
“It tastes amazing. It’s also incredibly democratic meat,” Packwood adds. “Everyone eats chicken. It’s very accessible, it’s affordable.”
“Accessible” and “democratic” are two words many people in the industry use to explain the staggering growth of this meat. Because to understand the rise of fried chicken, you need to first understand how chicken itself has been transformed from a luxury product into an everyday protein — not just in the UK, but worldwide.
Back in 1961, when records began, global production of poultry meat totalled a mere 7.5 million tonnes — a fraction of that of pork and beef, each responsible for about 25 million tonnes. In 1998 poultry overtook beef and it hit almost 118 million tonnes in 2019, overtaking pork for the first time, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Chicken is now the world’s number one meat. “People are coming out of beef, and chicken is an obvious protein to go to,” Packwood says.
The trend has been driven by a mixture of religion, culture, health and, principally, economics. Chicken has become, in relative terms, dramatically cheaper — thanks in part to the Chicken of Tomorrow contest organised by the US Department of Agriculture in 1948. This was an attempt to breed a bird that could, on a ounce-per-dollar basis, compete with pork and beef. Previously, chickens had been farmed primarily to lay eggs. The Chicken of Tomorrow contest had a profound effect on the poultry industry — creating a bigger, cheaper and more profitable bird with larger breasts and one that could be slaughtered after six weeks rather than twelve. Nearly all the chicken we eat in Britain today is sourced from two vast global breeding companies, Aviagen and Cobb, whose breeding methods and fast-growing birds owe their origins to this contest.
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In 1954, the year food rationing ended in Britain, the price of poultry was 47p per lb, while beef was 36p per lb. Now, chicken is £3.77 per kg, while beef is £8.07, according to the Office for National Statistics. As one industry insider told me baldly: “The reason why fried chicken is so popular? The profit margins.”
Many of the independent chicken shops offer one piece of fried chicken for £1.40 or a chicken burger for £2.50 — food that pocket money can stretch to — but even at that low price it is still profitable for shops. At Morley’s, a Chicken Steak Burger costs £2.29. Chloe Mayaki, 16, has come in with her cousin, Hannah, after finishing one of her GCSEs. “Everywhere you go is so expensive nowadays, but this keeps low prices. Everybody can afford this,” she says.
I spend a couple of hours working in the kitchen at this branch. I am handed a Morley’s T-shirt and baseball cap and have to get changed in a space behind the kitchen, in what appears to be a tiny lean-to housing a freezer, staff loo and cleaning equipment. The kitchen is not much bigger, but does not need to be — just two people work here on minimum wage per shift and the cooking process is very simple.
The raw chicken comes in large bags, already butchered into wings or legs. The pieces first get dunked into a basin of water, then a tub of plain flour, then into the water again and finally into a breading mix, which is a mixture of flour with spices, including white pepper, paprika, mustard and dried onion powder. The process is almost identical at KFC — although famously, very few KFC employees know the exact make-up of the 11 “secret” herbs and spices used in its original blend. The breading mix arrives at all the restaurants pre-mixed in bags from its flavour supplier. But it is known to contain black pepper, white pepper, garlic, paprika and celery salt, along with whey powder and egg powder to help the mix stick to the chicken. If you were really desperate to know the exact 11, you could excavate the cornerstone of the KFC head office in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1986, 11 vials containing the secret recipe ingredients were embedded into a concrete block.
Each piece of chicken is turned in the breading mix ten times at Morley’s (at Popeyes they boast about tossing it twenty times). Arumugam Chandrasegaran, 48, the manager, shows me how to bash two wings together to knock excess flour off the meat. He’s been here for two years, having previously worked at KFC. It is not high-tech. Fifteen breaded pieces are loaded onto a rack, which I have to drop into a pressure cooker full of oil. The lid is screwed on tightly, I push a button and, after just five and a half minutes at 180C, the wings are done.
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The pressure cooker — an appliance popularised by “Colonel” Harland Sanders, originally from Indiana, the founder of KFC — is what allows this to qualify as “fast” food, radically cutting the cooking time. It also increases succulence, according to fans of the process, creating steam inside the breaded exterior.
One of those fans is Shan Selvendran, the owner of Morley’s, whose kitchens use the same Henny Penny pressure cookers as KFC. Selvendran is the chicken king of south London, the man probably more than any other responsible for making junk food cool, courting both music producers and students to hang out in his shops.
After my shift, we chat in the restaurant. Aged 37, he is nattily dressed: a polo-neck, pocket square and chinos, but he shows me the labels to prove nothing is designer — they are from Next, Zara and H&M. He is quietly spoken and keen to stress that, despite Morley’s success, he and the business are very much “part of the community”. “I deliberately set up my headquarters near Lewisham market [in southeast London] because I love big brands coming to see me. I wanted them to have to walk through the market to see what Lewisham is, what the culture is.” One supplier is PepsiCo, which makes Mirinda fizzy drinks, originally intended for the Spanish market but adopted by London chicken shops with alacrity. Selvendran tells me he sells an amazing 117,000 cans a month, making him the biggest single seller of strawberry Mirinda in Europe.
Morley’s was founded in 1985 in Sydenham, southeast London, by Selvendran’s father, Indran, who was born in Sri Lanka and moved to the UK in the 1970s. There are now 105 branches, mostly in London but with outlets in Birmingham and Milton Keynes and ambitions for many more, using franchisees to open branches in new areas — a business model also used by KFC. Selvendran took over the company in 2009, when his father died.
The chain was given a huge boost by the rapper Stormzy in 2017, when it featured in the music video for Big for Your Boots. Morley’s now had street cred. “It’s always been part of the community, ever since 1985,” Selvendran says. “The biggest artists, the music stars coming out of the UK right now have come out of those communities, have grown up with Morley’s. That’s what’s given it a bit of extra relevance.” He considers the rapper Dizzee Rascal a friend and the musician occasionally calls him with menu suggestions. Also good for business is the British comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, whose popular Chicken Shop Date series on YouTube has featured her interviewing everyone from Jennifer Lawrence to Paul Mescal over spicy wings.
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For Selvendran, Morley’s is less a fast food outlet, more a social hub for young people. It is, he says, a place “you can be comfortable and be yourself”.
As we chat, a customer overhears us and approaches the table. “Oh my God. Are you the owner of Morley’s?” He nods slightly bashfully. “This is like meeting a celebrity,” she gushes. Jessica Kaliisa, 30, works in an office job for Amazon. She has just finished eating four spicy wings (£2), an afternoon snack after getting her hair done, and says the chain was part of her childhood.
She looks quizzically at the Morley’s T-shirt I am wearing; I explain that I am a journalist. “I didn’t think you looked like a Morley’s worker,” she says. Why? “You’re not the demographic.”
“What, I’m white?”
“Yeah. So when we come in and say ‘bossman’, you’re not… ” she dissolves into giggles. Bossman, slang for “chicken shop manager”, is such a common phrase used by customers that Morley’s has launched a Bossman Burger (£4.29) using a Morley’s Fried Chicken Sauce developed by Heinz — proof that chicken shops have gained a certain cachet even within vast multinational brands.
The venues, however, have been tainted by their association with gangs and violence. In 2019 the Youth Select Committee, investigating knife crime, heard evidence that so-called “chicken shop gangs” were recruiting young people with the offer of free chicken and putting them to work in return, acting as lookouts or as part of their drug operations. A poster campaign was launched by London Grid for Learning, a community of schools and local authorities in the capital, telling children: “There’s no such thing as free chicken!”
This prompted the Conservative government to target its #KnifeFree campaign at chicken shops — a move criticised by Labour’s David Lammy as “explicitly racist or, at best, unfathomably stupid”, claiming it merely pushed “the stereotype that black people love fried chicken”. Selvendran, however, said at the time that he was “proud to support” the campaign and wanted to “start conversations among all our customers”.
The year before, 15-year-old Jay Hughes — unconnected to any gang — was fatally stabbed outside a Morley’s in Bellingham, southeast London, by a 17-year-old gang member. The link between violent crime and cheap venues where young people like to hang out won’t go away. In 2022 three men were stabbed at Wngz, a chicken shop in Poplar, east London. Earlier this year, a 16-year-old was stabbed multiple times at Pepe’s Piri Piri in Colchester, Essex.
Rachel Noel, 54, works for Growing Against Violence, an anti-gang charity. I bump into her buying her lunch and she tells me it is not unfair to discuss the link between these venues and violence. “It’s true,” she says. “I know a chicken shop in Greenwich where these two gang members hang out every day buying chicken for younger kids to recruit them.” But you’re in Morley’s buying your own lunch? “Chicken shops are not the problem per se. It’s the older kids who are in there,” she says. “The older kids who use the opportunity to buy the young person fried chicken and then the young person is in their debt.”
The outlet Wingstop has embraced the positive associations of rap music, fried chicken and black youth culture. Founded in Texas, Wingstop was brought over to the UK by Tom Grogan, 33, from Birmingham, Herman Sahota, 34, from Luton — both big fans of American rap, especially Rick Ross, the larger-than-life musician and record producer behind the hit Hustlin’ — and Saul Lewin, 47. They met working as west London property developers in 2016.
“I was in the Mayfair office listening to Rick Ross in my headphones and he mentions this brand called Wingstop,” Grogan says. Intrigued, he googled it and discovered that Ross was a franchisee. Grogan emailed Wingstop’s head office and wrote: “Hey, I’m Tom from Mayfair. We’d love to bring your brand to Europe.” He had never even tried the food.
They flew to Dallas, secured the rights and opened the first British Wingstop in 2018, having first hired the public relations company that represented JD Sports, Nike and Asos to build up some hype. Grogan likes to stress that Wingstop is a lifestyle brand rather than a food one. “We’re not in the chicken business — we’re in the flavour business,” he says.
One of Wingstop’s selling points is that customers first choose their wings or boneless pieces and then one of ten flavourings, from mild Hawaiian to fiery Atomic, proof that chicken’s popularity rests on it being a fairly bland protein onto which you can slap pretty much any sauce or spice rub. “The ability to customise a chicken product versus your standard beef burger is far vaster,” Grogan says.
There are now 45 Wingstops, but “there’s probably whitespace for north of 300 to 350 sites”, Grogan says. “Whitespace” seems to be something of an industry catchphrase.
The restaurants, which are clean and bright, play a fairly loud playlist, which the UK head office curates and changes once a quarter. Current artists include Central Cee, Unrefined and Jorja Smith. It is an unashamed attempt to appeal to Gen Z. Sahota explains their target market: “Our customer is aged between fourteen to early twenties, probably from an ethnic demographic, interested in UK culture, shops at JD Sports, listens to UK rap music, into TikTok, social media and wears Nike.”
All the chicken is halal-certified. “It’s crucial. Muslim is the fastest-growing demographic in the UK,” Sahota says. The Muslim population more than doubled from 1.5 million to almost 4 million between the 2001 and 2021 censuses. Grogan adds that being halal “broadens our scope and our possibilities to enter locations” beyond the London heartland of chicken shops. He says: “Bradford — we couldn’t open without it.”
Morley’s used not to be halal, because of pork ribs on the menu, but in 2016 it started to rapidly convert its outlets. Now 96 of the 105 are halal. “If you’re a Muslim student you can’t go to a pub but you can go to a chicken shop,” Selvendran says, explaining its importance to his business, which also unashamedly courts teenage and student customers. Even KFC has started to convert some of its branches, with 215 — including those in Streatham — now being halal.
Back in 2010 the emergence of halal meat in restaurant and pub chains became a political hot potato, with some campaigners and politicians arguing halal slaughter was cruel and at odds with an increasingly secular society — halal traditionally prevents an animal from being stunned before having its throat cut; it also requires a prayer to be said at the moment of death. What’s changed?
Packwood at KFC says that Britain has become more tolerant of different religious practices: “I think there is much more acceptance now — it’s just part of life.” But what about the slaughtering process? “The vast majority of halal chicken is pre-stunned. We would literally not sell halal chicken if it wasn’t pre-stunned,” she says. HFA, the Halal Food Authority, the certification body used by many chicken shops, allows for poultry to be stunned in an electric water bath — deemed halal by some scholars because the chicken could be revived at this point. I suggest to Packwood that this is a fudge. “Lots of things in life are a fudge,” she answers.
Later, in Morley’s, I chat to Shak Dean, a British Pakistani who works for the Big Issue charity as a job coach. He has ordered six wings, chips and a strawberry Mirinda (£5.29) “for my Friday treat”. He’s chosen Morley’s because it is quick — “I’ve got an hour’s lunch break. I can get down to the mosque for Friday prayers, which is about 20 minutes, come here, get my Morley’s and get home and back to work” — but also because it’s halal; he always looks for the sign on the door. He says over the past decade halal has become mainstream. “Most schools now offer a halal option. If you go to school and your classmates are having it, it just becomes normal.”
Some of the chicken bosses point out halal meat is more expensive than standard poultry, but it’s an investment worth making. None, however, is prepared to stretch to free-range meat. Some, notably KFC, Wingstop and Popeyes, have signed up to the Better Chicken Commitment, a voluntary code that guarantees higher welfare standards than the bare minimum, notably using gas or electrical stunning and chicken breeds that live for longer than just six weeks before slaughter. But even this standard allows a stocking density of 30kg/m2, which means in the vast barns up to 14 birds can be squeezed in an area the size of the floor of a telephone box.
It is not surprising that budget chicken shops have avoided going free range. According to the British Poultry Council, less than 3 per cent of all poultry we consume in the UK is free range, a figure that has fallen in the past five years amid the cost of living crisis. Crowley at Popeyes says no customers have contacted the company to ask about its welfare standards. I ask if customers care? “Not much,” he says.
Selvendran is not joining his rivals in signing up to the BCC: “I am all for it to a certain degree, but I don’t like being dictated to. You never know where that begins and ends,” he says. He is also sceptical of his rivals’ attempts to position themselves as anything other than unhealthy fast food. At KFC they have cut down the calorie content in some recipes, stopped selling full-sugar fizzy drinks and stopped salting fries. Packwood admits there were complaints about the fries becoming bland, so they now season them with a spice and herb mix.
Still, a Mighty Bucket for One at 1,170 calories is hardly healthy. This compares with a McDonald’s Big Mac and medium fries at 830 calories; and Pret’s most calorific single item, the falafel and halloumi hot wrap, which is 657 calories. “I’m not saying it’s healthy. But it’s not unhealthy because you have to choose whether you want a big meal,” Packwood argues, adding that even “regular” customers of KFC visit just nine times a year. “If you’re coming to KFC every six weeks, you can’t blame KFC for your health.” Crowley at Popeyes says: “We’ve got a new kids’ range coming out in the summer, with salads coming on.”
Selvendran laughs when I ask if Morley’s would consider salads. “You know what? We have had it in a few shops, and people have come in and said, ‘What’s that nonsense? I haven’t come in to have a salad. What’s the point?’ ”
Most customers, when I query the health credentials of the food they are eating, either shrug or say it is an occasional treat.
Raheem Clarke, 16, is with two school friends in the KFC, having just finished a GCSE exam. He is not surprised when I tell him that he’s on the London street with the most fried chicken shops. “You see more KFCs or Morley’s than healthy places like Tesco where you could actually cook your food. You come out of your house and the first thing you see is fast food.” Is he concerned by the proliferation of chicken shops? “We play football and we’re about to go on tour, but here we are in KFC. It’s like we’re brainwashed,” he says, laughing.
With all the effort that goes into marketing, it’s easy to see how this brainwashing happens. Grogan at Wingstop talks about being the number one fast-food brand on TikTok; meanwhile, KFC redesigned the bun on its Ultimate BBQ Burger so that it had “char lines” to make it look as if it has come straight off a grill. “We’ve done a lot of work in our bun space,” Packwood says with pride. “Every single element makes it Instagrammable.”
But the desirability of fried chicken derives from something deeper than TikTok or Instagram. Packwood is a young-looking 50. When I meet her, she’s wearing pleather trousers, box-fresh trainers and an oatmeal-coloured sweatshirt with the KFC logo on the front. It’s clearly an item of “merch” rather than a company uniform. “When I wear this sweatshirt people come up and ask me where they can get it,” she says. “People want to wear KFC.”
I want to scoff but she’s correct: KFC and fried chicken have changed since she joined the company 16 years ago. “When I first started working for the brand, I remember saying to people that I worked for KFC. And one woman in the playground — we were pushing our kids on the swings — was, like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Now, when I tell people that I work for KFC they say, ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’ We’ve become relevant.”
That relevance is hard to pin down, but one customer expresses it neatly to me. Naeem Haris, a biomedical science student at King’s College London, is eating at Mr Peri’s, a couple of hundred yards from KFC. We talk about the difference between other fast food outlets and chicken shops. With a chicken shop, he says, “it feels like you’re coming to your friends. You know the owners, you know the people that come here. If you come in at the same time every day, you’re gonna see the same people.”
The poor reputation of chicken shops is not just because of their lack of nutrition but the fact they attract lots of teenagers. But at nearly all the outlets I visit in south London, the atmosphere is friendly, never threatening. “Youngsters, schoolkids, students — it’s a place they can call theirs,” Selvendran says. “I mean, where else can kids go? At least a chicken shop is accessible, is welcoming, is affordable.”