A 'belly up' history of London
Talking street food with historian and author Charlie Taverner
Charlie Taverner is a writer and historian, who lives in North London and currently works at Trinity College Dublin.
His first book, Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London was published last week by Oxford University Press. As you might expect, it’s a richly researched history book that, as Charlie puts it, “tells an unusual story of the city's history and also makes us think about the stories that we tell about our own city.” But it’s also a book that might help guide our future, by “inspiring us to eat differently, and be more aware of where our food comes from and who the people are that are delivering it to us.”
We spoke to Charlie on the day the book came out to ask him about the origins of his street food fascination as well as donkey races, baked sheep's heads, poisoned ice cream and oysters.
Hi Charlie. Before we get into talking about your book, we have to ask you the same question we ask everyone: What’s your relationship to London?
I’m a country boy really, I was born and brought up on a farm in Devon. I came to London in the early 2010s to start a job in journalism.
I think part of the reason why I’m really interested in London as an area of study and as something to write about is because, even though I’ve been here for around a decade, I still feel very new to the city and I’m still fascinated by it.
There’s that whole thing with people who live in cities isn’t there? About whether you can really say you’re from a place if you weren’t born there. So, I’m not sure whether I can really say I’m a Londoner, but I can certainly say that I love it and I find it endlessly interesting and entertaining.
You describe this book as ’a pandemic book’ but you’ve been interested in this idea of street food and markets for a long time, right?
Growing up, we had a farm shop and a butchery, and I spent a lot of my teenage days working in those. So, food growing and food selling is something that is very natural to me.
When I moved to London, one of the things I did a lot was go to street food markets with my friends. Because that really was the start of places like Street Feast and Kerb. I think those themes were certainly in my head when I went to Birkbeck to do my Masters and PhD.
Initially I was working on markets and market traders, but through that I became aware of these people who were always on the fringes of markets: the hawkers and street sellers. I was fascinated by them because they were always seen as something of an annoyance. People were always complaining about them because they were breaking the rules of the market. But, at the same time, they were recognised as being really important to the city and as playing a really useful role.
When it came to writing the book, the reason I chose to frame it around street food is because that allows me to relate it to something that we instantly know now: the idea of a food stall or a food truck, and that helps us think about the city we live in now and where that’s come from.
This feels like one of those rare parts of London history that’s relatively untold. There’s the images and the stereotypes that are in the public consciousness, but little beyond that. It seems like you found a real niche you could dig into.
People were aware of hawking and they were aware of street sellers and certainly, in the academic world, people were really aware of the art and the music that portrayed street sellers in London. But the whole story, told over a long period of metropolitan history, hadn’t necessarily been linked up before. Street selling remained really important for three centuries of London’s history, and into the 20th century as well, and I thought there was a fascinating question to answer around why this phenomenon seem to have endured for such a long period of time.
For me, connecting those stories of street selling over several centuries, allows us to look at a period of huge transformation in London, and to tell that story through the people working on the streets. The story of a city told from the stomach!
Can you just define what exactly a hawker is for us, and the kind of things they were selling?
I use the word ’hawker’ in the book to mean someone who’s selling small amounts of food, beyond the shops and official markets that represented the more formal side of the London economy. It’s people who are working in the margins of food selling in legal terms, but who are nonetheless really important to feeding the city.
They were selling a broad range of everyday essentials as well as occasional luxuries and ready-to-eat dishes. So, at one end of the spectrum, you had raw ingredients like the cheaper sorts of fish, as well as vegetables, from turnips and potatoes through to asparagus and peas. Then there’s kind of fresh produce you could eat right away: things like fruit, particularly soft fruit that went off quickly.
Milk is probably one of the foods that gets most forgotten in the story of street selling, because we don’t realise just how late dairy farming was going on around the edges of the capital. In the 1860s there are 20,000 cows being kept within the county of London, which is an astonishing, number. And those cows had to be milked and their milk was carried to people’s doors by street sellers.
But as well as fresh, perishable foods, there were also lots of street food that you could wolf down on the street. Some of that was baked goods, like gingerbread and cake and various kinds of tarts and biscuits. But you also had hearty, often very meaty faire, like smoked sausages, hot peas and sandwiches as well as things that we would perhaps not be so comfortable with today, like cow’s feet and baked sheep’s heads.
Those heartier kinds of street food were really important in a city where space and facilities for cooking in people’s homes were very limited. So being able to pop out on to the street to find a stall where someone selling some baked sheep’s heads, or perhaps a vender who’s got some fried fish was a really important part of many people’s diets.
This wasn’t just eating as a luxury. It was a matter of everyday importance.
Can you just talk about a little about the cries of the hawkers, because I think that’s what forms a big part of the image of the street seller in the cultural imagination?
The cries do seem to conjure this idea of a city that was raucous, noisy and extremely lively. We get a little taste of that in lots of the markets that still exist around London today. I live not too far away from Ridley Road and there are always people from market stalls and even from the shops, calling out what’s good, or what might be in season.
But we have to remember that crying for street vendors was primarily a form of advertisement. It was a way to catch people’s attention. And they could do that through the words they used, but they could also grab people’s attention through a big leap in pitch or a funny rhythm, or the way they repeat themselves. So, it’s not always what they’re saying that’s important, so much as how they’re saying it and how they’re filling the soundscape of the city.
Londoners in the past were also fascinated by this. It often annoyed them actually, and most of our sources and evidence for the sound of the streets then comes from people complaining about the fish women and orange women who were making a racket outside on the street or the ’discordant cries’ of the street sellers, that were completely nonsensical. The writer Jonathan Swift writes in a testimony from the early 18th century, that he can hear a particular vegetable seller outside his window and then he scribbles down that he wishes that the cabbage he was selling would get stuck down his throat!
And who were these hawkers? The easy stereotype is the older woman or the Cockney bloke… That Mary Poppins/Oliver Twist caricature. But these were all sorts of people weren’t they?
One of the sections in the book is called ’All sorts of Londoners’ and I used that because the people that hawked food in the street did cover a wide spectrum of London life.
Early on, women did dominate the street trades and lots of the early caricatures about hawking are to do with women; and very often their gender was used as a way to criticise them. But gradually more men entered the trade and that’s probably to do with the growth in the size of the working population and more people realising that hawking was a way to stay above water.
Hawkers could range from very old people that couldn’t do any other kinds of labour, to young children who were assisting their parents, to teenagers who didn’t have many family connections and were just drifting along.
Many of them did come from London, and that was a real benefit in a job that is precarious and difficult. Being able to navigate the streets of the city and knowing that legal ins and outs is really important for survival in that situation.
But there were also lots of immigrants who arrived in the capital and then ended up selling on the streets. Initially there was a large Irish population, who were really associated with selling fruit, and oranges in particular. There were successive waves of Jewish immigrants, and then as we go into the 19th century, groups of Italian immigrants, who had strong association with selling ice cream.
There are lots of journalistic accounts in late Victorian London of the Little Italy area north of Holborn, of these ice cream vendors mixing their ice with all sorts of different flavourings and then selling it out into the streets of the city. These accounts do have a certain amount of xenophobia and skepticism running through them, with people commenting on exactly what that ice cream contained, and there were even newspaper reports describing people falling ill from it.
I think that tells you a lot about the hostility directed towards immigrants coming in to the city, who were already facing confined opportunities as well as all the other difficulties and challenges.
One of the elements in the book that I wasn’t really expecting to find was the collective identity that grew amongst this community. Who knew that hawkers had sports days!?
For a long time, hawkers were characterised as individualists. It was seen as a difficult and lonely trade: going out on the streets on your own with the wheelbarrow. But when you look a bit closer, there’s lots of opportunities for these people to come together in the street markets, where they gathered in greater numbers in the late Victorian period.
So, of course, there’s going to be a sense of common feeling between them and, over time, that develops into a really strong sense of community identity.
There was a serious side to that, in that they started to form trade unions to give themselves political leverage. But there’s a social side to it as well, from the sports day that they held up at Kensal Rise, through to the costermonger’s donkey show, the first one of which was held in 1864 just down the road from where I live now, at the agricultural hall in Islington, which is now the Business Design Centre.
There were a hundred donkeys exhibited on that day - including one gifted by the Prince of Wales - and there was donkey racing around a track in the hall. It’s a wonderful image, although today we might think a little bit harder about the way the animals were treated. But it does speak to the fact that street sellers were developing a really strong sense of identity and things like the barrows they pushed and the donkeys that they had as their companions were an important part of their working identity.
I guess the big question is, why did street hawkers disappear? What were those social and economic forces that took these people out of the city?
The change really starts to happen in the second half of 19th century when the recently formed Metropolitan Police started taking a stricter role in policing the streets and generally ’keeping order’. One aspect of that was issuing a set of regulations about where and how street sellers could park their stalls, and how long their barrows could be. That regulation eventually creeps into the period after the First World War when local authorities across London are given the power to licence street selling.
So no longer could someone just pitch up a barrow and start hawking some vegetables or some sandwiches. They had to have a licence from the council and probably had to pay some kind of rent for a pitch. What that meant was that the ’bottom-up’, organic kind of street selling gave way to something that was a bit more sanctioned and controlled. At the same time, you had big transport changes. The first motor cars start appearing on the city, so the streets are getting busier. Then we also start getting big changes in retail and the real watershed moment is the rapid rise of multiple retailers and in particular supermarkets, which obviously changes the way that groceries are bought and sold and removes the real raison d’etre of hawking in the city.
Coming right up to today, it was interesting during the pandemic, when people seemed to discover their local neighbourhoods and their local food sellers. There was a definite feeling of people connecting with their localities again, and enjoying that sense of interacting with ‘real people’ when buying their food.
Definitely, and in some ways that fits in with trends that have appeared more recently around things like farmers markets and even the street food trend in a way.
There’s a desire I think for a greater connection where food comes from and a more interpersonal connection with the people that are buying and selling that food. I think that’s wonderful both for making us understand where our food comes from and also appreciating the people that are producing it and cooking it and putting in on our tables.
At the same time, I think we also need to ask questions about how exclusive those spaces are. Because the people that can afford to go to them often tend to be from quite an exclusive demographic and what’s being sold tends to be more of a luxury product or a treat. And while people might be able to afford them from time to time, it’s not something that a lot of people can do regularly.
So, I think while we’re trying to make our food system in London much more personal and direct and full of sensation and deliciousness, we should also be aware of keeping those spaces as democratic as possible.
One last question: What’s the one market stall or street food experience that you’d recommend people try out?
There’s one that springs to mind, but I’m not sure if it even necessarily qualifies as street food, but it definitely has that essence. It’s Decatur.
On several occasions we’ve had their home shrimp boils, where you cook your shrimp and potatoes and corn and then pour it out on to newspaper. I think there was just something really wonderful about eating with your hands from newspaper, during lockdown. Plus, they do great oysters!
[At this point Charlie and I have a five-minute conversation about how great Decatur is, but we’ll spare you from that. Suffice to say, if you haven’t tried their shrimp boils, you should give them a go.]
You can follow Charlie on Twitter here.
On Friday 16th Feb Charlie is giving a (free) lecture on street food and hawkers at Guildhall Library. You can get tickets here.
And you can buy Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London from Oxford University Press or Bookshop.org.