I’ve long held firm to the adage that you can’t truly call yourself a local in the town, city or village you reside in until you’ve spent over half your life there.
By my own calculation, I’ve just tipped over into becoming a Londoner: as of this year, I have spent 24 of my 47 years in the capital.
Not only that, but I’m marrying into the clan too. My fiancée – whom I’ll be tying the knot with in the spring – is a born-and-bred Chelsea girl whose proximity to the sound of Bow Bells has never strayed further than Crystal Palace.
I live here, not because I have to (being a freelance journalist these days means I could probably pen this from Bali or Bognor if I chose) but because my love affair with the capital is still fervent. This, despite the place appearing to do almost everything in its power to obfuscate its sui generis charm under a tonne of speed restrictions, tube strikes and branches of Costa.
But there are still things I miss about the North. And as I get older, my limerence is increasingly food based. I know you’ll think what I’m about to say is a paean to prole-Proustian aesthetics, but I found myself experiencing utterly disproportionate levels of joy recently when I found that my local branch of Iceland down here in Stockwell had started stocking Seabrook crisps.
For the uninitiated, Seabrook are a Bradford-based firm whose crinkle cut, sea salt crisps, are, for my money, the greatest potato crisp available to man or beast.
The undulating stripes that run across the packet give the bag a retro, treat-at-the-seaside look while the typeface (which I think is called Gill Sans) has a lovely hint of the kind of posters you saw a generation or two ago for Players or Park Drive cigarettes. It somehow does this without looking ersatz; a small triumph in itself.
As for the crisp, once you’ve had a Seabrook ready salted, you’ll find all other crisps impossibly thin and brittle weaklings. They’re thick, they’re hearty, and they crunch like a Rolls Royce driving over a gravel driveway. As an accompaniment to a pint of bitter, they are without equal.
I should point out here that I don’t have a side-hustle gig with Seabrook. I’m certain that the potentates of the brand have no idea who I am, and care even less. But I’m overjoyed to now be able to remove them from my list of foods from my formative years (spent around the Wirral and Teesside) that are, even in this era of overnight distribution from Thurso to Truro, hard to find outside of their home patch.
The appearance of Seabrook in London would, in my salt and sodium saturated dreams, be swiftly followed by an outpost ‘homesick’ branch of Booths; the upmarket northern store that specialises in gourmet versions of foods that are almost entirely unavailable (unless you cook it from scratch of course) south of Crewe.
Booths sells butter pies – a delicious two-fingered insult to the Health Minister, referenced by Paul McCartney in his 1970 US number one hit ‘Uncle Albert’. God knows what they made of that in Kansas and Kentucky.
The list of items I’d love to have on hand in SW9, but which are surprisingly difficult to buy, even by mail order, also includes potted beef (readily available at Booths) Ben Shaw’s Dandelion and Burdock, Denby Dale branded pies and stottie rolls. The latter gets its name from the Geordie for ‘stot’, meaning to bounce, as the bread capable of doing should it make impact with the floor, such is its crusty, beautiful density. These are available at many Northeastern branches of Greggs (and are lovely when filled with egg mayo) but are entirely absent from the brand’s myriad bakeries beyond the Tyne.
I’ve started wondering if this is just a north/south divide. Are there Londoners who hail from the West Country or Norfolk who have similar longings for shop-bought foods which nowhere in London has ever felt the need to stock? Are there exiled Londoners in Northumberland or North Wales who crave pie and mash or anything at all from Waitrose, a supermarket whose presence in the North is still surprisingly thin?
What’s certain is that we have entirely lost our regional identities when it comes to everyday foods in this country. Domino’s, McDonalds et al have thrown their weight into creating a situation whereby a denizen of Dundee is eating exactly the same things for lunch (still called dinner, in my house) as any doyen of Dorchester. But the behemoths haven’t quite won out.
So, given that lifelong inhabitants of London like my wife-to-be (who is actually half-Irish, half-Swedish anyway) are so scarce, I can only assume that within the tube map there must be myriad Welsh exiles in Wealdstone keening for a tin of Parson’s laverbread and Yorkshire folk in Fulham who have long resigned themselves to never finding a bottle of Henderson’s relish on the shelves.
These items help make up the minutiae of our horribly self-lacerated and over criticised indigenous food culture. And although it’s probably wise to suggest that having all these northern brands in London could ruin our regional diversity as much as a branch of Fortnum and Masons in Hartlepool could reduce the royal gourmet standby’s exclusivity, it’s an argument that loses its lustre when you’re in the pub, tipsy, hungry and confronted with no option than to buy another mini-tube of bloody Pringles.
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