Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Following him through a maze of brick arches, I find myself in the main market hall, where, beneath a decaying iron canopy, there is a seething, hissing, sizzling city of food. Alleyways lined with stalls and kitchens stretch out in all directions, their narrow passages stuffed with guzzling humanity. Everywhere I look, groups of people stand huddled against the cold, tucking into great fistfuls of food. Most of them look slightly furtive, as people eating on the hoof often do, but the relish with which they eat is unmistakable. The air is filled with the smell of garlic and sausages, as frenzied cooks fry and shout, trying to keep up with demand. Above their heads, cows and sheep gaze meditatively down from painted rural idylls, proclaiming the pedigree of the produce on offer. Fatty steam rises up through the pastoral troposphere, lending a dreamy quality to the already struggling light.

  Back at ground level, there is a sense of barely suppressed excitement, as if everyone has stumbled on the same great secret, and can’t quite believe their luck. One pair of smartly dressed young lads dash from one stall to another, in an apparent attempt to taste everything on offer before returning to their desks. ‘Are you in the falafel line?’ asks a breathless American voice behind me. I am not, as it happens, but she can be forgiven for her mistake. The place is so hectic that it feels more like the old Stock Exchange during a crash than the superannuated wholesale fruit and veg market that, until around 10 years ago, it was. Pushing on through the throng, I come across one couple transfixed by a dazzling cheese display. ‘This is just like France!’ exclaims the man, as I try to squeeze past. It couldn’t be much less like France, I think, but I know what he means. Heady encounters with food are rare in Britain, while in France they remain relatively commonplace.

  Returning to another cheese stall I saw earlier, I commit the unspoken sin of asking for a piece of cheese without trying some first. ‘Have you tasted it?’ asks the stallholder, with a look of real concern. ‘It’s got a bit of a funny taste, that one. I remember the day I made it last October. The cows had just gone on to some new silage, and I remember thinking there was something meadowy about it.’ Thrilled to be getting all this unsolicited information, I ask the stallholder to tell me more about himself. He is Tom Bourne, whose family have been making Cheshire cheese for over 200 years. Most of it is sold anonymously these days under supermarkets’ own labels, although some gets sold under his own name at the delicatessen counters of larger stores. The supermarkets have been good to him, he says, although he has heard plenty of horror stories from other farmers supplying the ‘Big Four’.2 Asked why he chooses to come in person to Borough Market, he says it’s the fact that nobody seems to understand Cheshire cheese any more. The taste is so dependent on its freshness, on how it is made, stored and sold, that he feels compelled to show people what it can be like at its best. I agree that his cheese (which is sharp, tangy and, yes, meadowy) is unlike any Cheshire I’ve tasted before. At this point some other customers arrive and I ask Mr Bourne if we can meet up later, but he says he is going for an organ lesson in Southwark Cathedral. That’s the sort of place Borough Market is. The yellow cheeses the size of car tyres I spotted on the way in turn out to be Comté, a rich, nutty cheese from the Jura mountains. They have been personally imported by a stand-up comic with a philosophy degree who is using them to finance his first novel.

  There is something odd about Borough. It is a food market, but not, as Captain Kirk might have said, as we know them. At first glance it appears to be a farmers’ market, but don’t go there expecting to buy cheap lettuces covered in earth. The food at Borough Market is expensive, some of it phenomenally so. Of course high cost is the price one pays for real food, made in traditional ways – it is a real cost, as opposed to the artificially low prices we have got used to paying for industrial food. Yet despite what the banner says, Borough is a food-lover’s playground, not somewhere to go and buy your daily groceries. The reason it feels so unlike French markets is that in France, people still go to market as a matter of routine, not just on the occasional whim or as a special treat. On one recent visit to Paris, I counted no fewer than 20 people queuing at a market stall (most of them equipped with decidedly unglamorous wheeled shopping baskets) in order to buy high-quality vegetables at a good price. This was no flea market either: this was Marché Monge, in the well-heeled cinquième, where some of the stalls are every bit as rarefied as those at Borough. One handful of black tomatoes I bought there nearly bankrupted me. The point is that Marché Monge caters to every kind of customer, not just to people looking for a foodie thrill.

  Borough feels odd because it exists in a country that has lost touch with its food culture – where the vast majority of us do most of our shopping in supermarkets. What Borough offers is an experience; an echo, for those who can afford it, of the excitement that food markets once brought to cities. Borough is not really about buying food at all, it is about celebrating it. Nothing new in that – food has always been celebrated in cities, especially in cosmopolitan ones like London. But that has generally meant attending magnificent feasts or dining in fancy restaurants, not gobbling something down while standing up in one’s overcoat. At Borough, food has become an end in itself. It has become fetishised, as if it were invested with some cathartic power to transform lives. The people who come here, although plainly enjoying themselves, seem to be searching for something more: for roots, for meaning, for salvation, even.

  Borough is neither a farmers’ market nor a neighbourhood one, so what is it exactly? It certainly doesn’t lack tradition: there has been a market here or hereabouts since pre-Roman times. Thanks to its prime position next to London Bridge – London’s only river crossing until the surprisingly late date of 1729 – the market enjoyed a virtual monopoly on produce coming into the capital from the south, remaining integral to London’s wholesale fruit and vegetable trade until the early 1970s, when the opening of New Covent Garden robbed it of much of its business. The market limped through the 1980s, steadfastly refusing all overtures from developers who were then converting much of the area into a mirror image of the City on the opposite bank. This remarkable resistance to the forces of Mammon was due to the market’s 1754 charter, which put it in the hands of a local board of trustees with the proviso that it was to be run solely for the benefit of the local parishioners, the basis on which it is still run today.

  It was a lucky escape. Many famous food markets in the West were swept away during the 1970s and 80s, once their role in feeding cities was at an end. In 1971, London’s Covent Garden came within days of demolition to make way for one of the Greater London Council’s most lamentable (thankfully unrealised) projects, a precast concrete office precinct replete with those essential accoutrements of seventies urbanism, pedestrian podiums and flying walkways.3 To London’s eternal benefit, the GLC was foiled by a determined band of local residents and traders in a landmark public enquiry, and the market went on to become the thriving mixed-use neighbourhood it is today.4 Thirty years on, it seems extraordinary that anyone could have thought demolishing Covent Garden was a good idea, but planning history is full of such lapses. The citizens of Paris, for instance, have had over three decades to lament the loss of Les Halles, the beauty of which put even Covent Garden in the shade. Its fabled glass and iron halls were demolished to make room for an underground shopping centre whose chief contribution to the urban landscape is a series of giant plastic tubes descending into a gaping pit: a desolate, crime-ridden wasteland in the heart of the city.

  By the mid-1990s, with planning’s Brave New World phase safely over, Borough Market found itself in a part of town that was suddenly trendy. The reconstructed Globe Theatre was just down the road, and the Tate Modern and Jubilee Line were nearing completion. Some food retailers had already moved into the area, among them Randolph Hodgson, co-founder of Neal’s Yard Dairy and a veteran of Covent Garden’s renaissance. Hodgson was convinced that something similar could be achieved at Borough, and in 1998 he approached the trustees with the idea of setting up
a farmers’ market there, receiving a far warmer welcome than any developer ever had. The market invited Henrietta Green, pioneering champion of small British producers, to mount a Food Lovers’ Fair there for a trial weekend. It was a huge success, attracting more than 30,000 visitors over three days, and Borough has never looked back. It is now a firm fixture on London’s gastronomic map, even finding a new home for some ironwork reclaimed from Covent Garden’s Floral Hall, demolished during the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House.

  The use of food to foster urban renewal is a relatively new phenomenon, one that can be traced back to Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace, one of America’s most successful tourist attractions.5 These days, 18 million people flock to Faneuil Hall every year, but back in the early 1970s, the market’s future looked bleak. It had been empty and derelict since ceasing trading in the mid-1960s, and nobody could think what to do with its elegant colonial buildings – a failure of imagination that seems incredible now, given that one of them, the eponymous Faneuil Hall, is none other than the famed ‘Cradle of Liberty’ where Bostonians first demanded ‘no taxation without representation’. Cradle or not, the Hall was facing the chop when it received a last-minute reprieve in the shape of Edward J. Logue, newly appointed head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority and a man determined to make the market a ‘purveyor of honest beef’ once more. The question was, how?

  The answer came from the unlikeliest of sources: the shopping mall. Ever since the 1950s, malls had been springing up all over America, and developer Jim Rouse had unparalleled knowledge of them, having built more than 50. But Rouse was starting to have his doubts about malls, and the inner-city decay they helped to create. When Edward Logue approached him to develop the Boston waterfront, it occurred to him that if he could package the market like a mall, with lots of shops and restaurants, people might want to come to spend time there, just as they did at the out-of-town version. It was an untried concept, but since nobody had any better ideas, they went with it.

  Faneuil Hall Marketplace was the result, and it was an immediate success, thanks to all the factors that should have been obvious from the start: its buildings were stunning and packed with history, they were on Boston’s ‘Freedom Trail’, and there were thousands of tourists mooing around with nowhere else to go. The derelict market was transformed into a lively leisure complex full of shops, theatres, restaurants and cafés, its cobbled streets thronging with performance artists, street vendors and tourists eating ice-cream. For Rouse, it was a revelation. He never built another mall, ploughing his considerable fortune instead into a number of charitable projects focused on urban renewal. Faneuil Hall became his prototype ‘festival marketplace’, a concept he took all over the world. The formula, which in essence is food tourism, should be familiar to anyone who has visited New York’s South Street Seaport, Baltimore’s Harbor Place or London’s Covent Garden: Rouse developed the first two and advised on the latter.

  Although in some respects ‘festival marketplaces’ are fake, the life they engender is very real. By inhabiting buildings and spaces made by food, they acquire an authentic quality that transcends the inevitable shop and restaurant chains that form the backbone of their commercial operations. Borough Market goes one better, bringing genuine artisanal food back to the heart of the city. Sometimes it tries too hard: one cider-seller there looks like an extra from Tess of the D’Urbervilles, complete with pastiche rustic hut and thatched roof. But if the cider he sells is excellent, why should we complain? Buying cider from him is still better than getting some tasteless brew off a supermarket shelf. For one thing – if you can get past the straw wig – it involves human contact. For another, it helps preserve what remains of quality local food in Britain.

  Wherever food markets survive, they bring a quality to urban life that is all too rare in the West: a sense of belonging, engagement, character. They connect us to an ancient sort of public life. People have always come to markets in order to socialise as well as to buy food, and the need for such spaces in which to mingle is as great now as it has ever been – arguably greater, since so few such opportunities exist in modern life. The success of markets like Borough suggests that we have not lost the appetite for such encounters in Britain, yet ordinary street markets are dying out all over the country. This seeming paradox is explained by the fact that food is not embedded in our culture. We only lavish time and money on it when we are ‘treating ourselves’, not as part of daily routine. That is why we respond so well to food tourism, why we love to shop in markets when we go abroad, why the man at Borough said it felt ‘like France’. Borough is a manifestation of our overwhelming disconnection with food in Britain, not the opposite.

  Bring on the Clones

  Twenty years ago, if you needed to buy a few basic items – say, a loaf of bread, a pint of milk and half a dozen eggs – you would probably have nipped down to your local shop to get them. Today the chances are you would buy them from a supermarket. Independent food shops in Britain are currently closing at a rate of more than 2,000 a year, and the total number has fallen by half in just over a decade. One recent study predicted that by 2050 there won’t be any left at all.6 But you don’t have to read industry research to know what is happening in the British grocery trade: just glance at your monthly bank statements. Unless you live in some remote part of the country supermarkets haven’t yet reached (or you are one of those rare beasts who has the time, means and inclination to source your food elsewhere), the likelihood is that one name – that of your nearest supermarket – will recur with monotonous regularity.

  Shopping for food is when most of us become aware of the industrial supply chain for the first time – the moment it impacts directly on our lives. With their miles of stocked-up shelving and serried ranks of tills, supermarkets are the means by which the global food superhighway enters our cities and is transferred down to our individual scale – a daily feat equivalent to converting a raging torrent into millions of glasses of water. As far as supermarkets are concerned, this last stage of food delivery is the trickiest one of all – the operation they are least well suited to. The human scale is not what supermarkets have ever been about; nor are the idiosyncratic layouts of traditional city centres. Both mess up the economies of scale on which their profits rely.

  Supermarkets aren’t really compatible with cities; at least not with the dense, higgledy-piggledy sort you get in the Old World. The first ones in the USA barely ventured into cities at all: they just sat on the outskirts of towns and waited for customers to drive to them. Eighty years on, out-of-town retailing remains the ideal for supermarkets, because it allows them to stick to what they do best – source food cheaply and move it around in bulk – and leaves customers to do the rest. Given that the public role of historic city centres was chiefly the buying and selling of food, supermarkets are at odds not just with local high streets, but with the very concept of what a city is.

  I still remember my first encounter with the problem. It was on a day trip with some friends to Somerset in the early 1980s, and we had stopped in a small market town to get a newspaper, some coffee and some aspirin. It was a lovely Saturday morning and the town had a beautiful high street, but there were very few people about, which I remember seemed a little odd at the time. After wandering up and down the street for a few minutes, we were unable to find a café, chemist, or newsagent, although had we wanted to buy property in the area we could have chosen from any one of at least six estate agents. Perplexed and starting to get just a little grumpy, we finally asked a passer-by for some help. He looked at us as if we were a bit slow, and pointed down the road, where a few hundred yards out of town (how could we have missed it?) was the sprawling red-tiled roof of a Tesco superstore. It was one of the new breed of ‘village centre’ types – all fake-vernacular detailing with a cartoon clock tower – and none of us had ever seen such a thing before. Within a few minutes, we had our aspirin and newspaper, but the cup of coffee still eluded us. Although the store had a c
afé, it was so full of what seemed like the entire population of the town stuffing itself with burgers and chips at 11 a.m. that we decided we couldn’t face the queue.

  Nobody would make the same mistake today. In the intervening 25 years, supermarkets have transformed the British urban landscape. Although the first out-of-town superstore was built as early as 1970 (guess which: a Tesco), the great era of superstore expansion in Britain took place in the 1980s and 90s, during two decades of rampant development that, unlike anywhere else in Europe, went virtually unchecked by planning constraints. By the time the Tory government woke up to the damage out-of-town stores were causing, it was too late. By the mid 90s there were more than 1,000 in Britain, and the lingering death of the British high street had already begun. A study carried out by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in 1998 found that a new superstore built on the edge of a town could reduce market share for city-centre food shops by as much as 75 per cent.7 A subsequent report by the New Economics Foundation (nef) entitled Ghost Town Britain showed how even a small reduction in business in the high street was enough to start killing shops off, eventually reaching a ‘tipping point’ when the old town centre was no longer viable: ‘Once the downtown starts to shut down, people who preferred to shop there have no choice but to switch to the supermarket. What begins as a seemingly harmless ripple becomes a powerful and destructive wave.’8

  A decade after the superstore tsunami devastated British town centres, the supermarkets realised that the resultant void represented a new business opportunity. Once again, Tesco led the way, opening its first ‘Metro’ stores in 1998 – corporate replicas of the local shops it had just helped to destroy. At first Tesco moved cautiously, not sure how well the new ‘convenience’ format would perform, but it need not have worried. It was soon clear there was an enormous untapped demand for inner-city food shops, and the battle was then on to claim as many prime high-street sites as possible before their rivals. In 2002, Tesco bought T&S, an existing convenience chain with 450 stores, converting them at the rate of four to five a week. Although the land grab raised some City eyebrows (one analyst reckoned it would have taken Tesco 15 years to expand its business that quickly without the takeover), it was approved by the Competition Commission on the basis that convenience food shopping is a different market to that of ‘one-stop’ shopping at supermarkets.9