I don't suppose it will be news to many of its former customers that the London bakery chain Percy Ingle's closed all its shops last year. But it certainly came as a shock to me when I made the discovery a few weeks ago.
Even though the local branch had been shut ever since the first lockdown it didn't occur to me that this might be the end. Call it denial, arrant stupidity, or what you will, but I think I'd vaguely assumed that they were waiting for the final all-clear, reluctant to go head to head with the more widely known rival depicted above, or, I dunno, maybe one of the assistants had got covid or the family-run company was reluctant to put staff at risk, or ...
In my defence, although the shop had been shuttered there had been no other indication that anything might be afoot, no sign of building work or the interior being stripped or anything - until, that is, one morning a comparatively trendy eaterie was suddenly there in its stead. Which led me to search out the articles online and read the sad details about this situation.
Yes, it may be only one of many casualties in these desperate times and it won't be the last. But it's a major one in its way, because it means that in many London high streets now there won't be any alternative to that rival chain: eat up and shut up. Which is sad news indeed, because while The Rival's seemingly ever-escalating success may be accounted some kind of economic or marketing marvel, Barney Farmer's Viz strip, reproduced above, suggests I'm not the only one who doubts whether it represents a triumph for quality.
I don't know what the situation is over the country as a whole, though I'd certainly like to think there may be some equivalent bakers elsewhere who are up against it but still managing to hold out. For many, however, the battle was lost years ago, in London and elsewhere. The above strip, dating, I believe, from 2015, was a one-off, but Farmer has spoken in an interview about the inspiration behind it and his bleakly hilarious Drunken Bakers strip, created with Lee Healey, which has long been a staple of Viz:
In Preston, where I’m based, all the good bakeries were purged within a period of about ten years by Greggs and other regional chains. These old family-run concerns would close one day and be a Greggs a week later, which I took as a personal affront.This helps to explain why, in my neck of the woods, the disappearance of Percy Ingle's last year matters: it's the death knell of virtually the last vestige of competition, and if we can't take our custom elsewhere The Rival can only grow bigger.
I can't date precisely when I became aware of bakeries around me starting to disappear - all killed, I presume, by the cheaper prices of that rival. Yet with the exception of the Viz strips there has been no general outcry that I know of - nothing, at any rate, to compare with the concerted hostility shown towards the ever-expanding McDonalds empire. Why is that?
I suspect it may be down, in part, to canny marketing. The Rival did not originate in Scotland but when I first saw a branch, in the Glasgow suburb of Rutherglen, the shop sign had "of Rutherglen" below the company name, as though were some local venture ("Scottish bakeries for Scottish people") which it behooved all decent citizens to support. (I sometimes fantasise about a reworking of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in which the central speech becomes a warning about a different kind of insidious menace entirely ...)
But it's also down to price. I recall a conversation with my eldest brother a few years ago in which he was praising The Rival (I can't bear to name 'em) for offering a bag containing half a dozen (or whatever) sausage rolls at the bargain price of one pound. As we had grown up in the West of Scotland, where bakeries used to outnumber people eight to one, I pointed out that the taste of those cheapo sausage rolls was far inferior to what we had both known, a fact which he didn't dispute but brushed aside as an irrelevance: six for a pound; just think about that.
Even so, it's hard to understand why, over the last few decades, so many customers have chosen to desert those individual bakeries, or smaller chains, who had served them so well for so long. True, prices may have been a little higher but the cost of a sausage roll with better ingredients won't exactly break the bank, so why cut back? And even if (whisper it) Ingle's wasn't necessarily the very best among all those lost at sea in recent decades the company still represented an alternative experience, a different kind of taste, and I shall miss my local branch, though I suspect lockdown was merely the final nail in the coffin: I shopped there fairly regularly but it never seemed to be busy. It was located by a bus station, near the entrance of a shopping mall, a spot which ought to have been handy for attracting passing trade ... but branches of The Rival could be found a few yards away on either side.
As you may have gleaned by now, bakeries have loomed large in my life, for good and ill. They have provided solace as well as sustenance - a good deal too much of the former at times. I can't pinpoint the age at which I became an active customer, as opposed to enjoying the scones, pastries and pies brought home by my mother, but in the town where I grew up there seemed to be one on every street corner. In the mid-seventies I once attempted a "bakery crawl" on the South Side of Glasgow - an activity which, as I can now report, has rapidly diminishing returns and is not to be generally recommended. The experiment was not repeated, but the point is that there seemed to be as many bakeries as pubs in the West of Scotland back then, of all different sorts and varieties.
Some names can still give an unexpected thrill. When John Byrne's Glasgow-set Tutti Frutti was finally issued on DVD I gasped at a moment I'd forgotten, seeing Vincent Diver's (Maurice Roeves) wife bearing a flimsy cardboard box from Diggens, one of the better quality bakers with branches around Glasgow. They, too, now seem long gone and nowhere, and it may be that this digitally preserved moment is their only memorial. (Wonder how many other people experienced a similar frisson at the sight?)
There are two other bakery-related memories which insist on inclusion here. A couple of years ago I made a melancholy pilgrimage to an off-license in the East End of Glasgow where I worked as a student. I've no idea how common these were, but The Rival had a day-old baker's shop nearby where you could get slightly stale gingerbread etc at a bargain price. ... and yes, the blogger's code means that I'm duty-bound to admit that, in the words of Paul Simon, "I took some comfort there" on occasion: I was young, didn't know what I was doing, etc.
But let's put aside any silly talk about whether that revelation means that my brother could now be said to occupy the moral high ground, because that shop, with its hardening bread and cakes, is not what sticks in the memory - well, not out of pleasure, anyway. Make a quick about turn, because across the road was what didn't even seem to be a regular shop, more just a small and narrow room open to the street - but dispensing the most delicious small steak pies, which you could actually watch being made on a stove.
When I made that sentimental journey, some forty years after I'd last been in the area, it was all a bit of a letdown. I had some difficulty locating the shop where I used to work, for starters, because the interior, now put to a different use, was unrecognisable, and the place with the steak pies seemed to have disappeared. I did see a sign saying "Betty's Pie Shop" but it didn't quite square with my memories ... perhaps better, in any case, to leave the pies of yesteryear where they are, savoured in memory only.
Part of the reason behind the trip was that I'd only lately learnt of the death of my former boss at that time. In between serving punters and snacking on steak pies we'd had many happy conversations about pop music and much else, and although the friendship hadn't continued beyond the shop it was something remembered with fondness. In recent years I'd had the vague thought of contacting him again but had never actually put it into action until I found a little book evocative of those days; I sent it off with a note suggesting we meet up, only to receive the sad news from his wife: time is not elastic, as current events are showing us.
I have no choice in the matter of my final stop in this brief tour of Bakeries I Have Loved: the establishment in question is gone, and there is very little information online, so a memory it must stay. When I was a child the best local bakery - and there were many to choose from - had a restaurant upstairs, where my mother would take me for an occasional treat. At some point, well before my teens, I think, the restaurant closed, though the bakery downstairs continued trading, with many mouthwatering goodies on offer. I have a particularly vivid memory of a small brown loaf - made, I believe, to the baker's own special recipe - whose texture and taste had something of the croissant about it; I recall placing bacon and grated cheese on top of this treat one luxurious morning while watching the film Holiday Camp and looking forward to an imminent change for the better in my life. (Not as a direct result of consuming this superfatted snack, you understand, but the one has become inextricably linked with the other.)
That bakery, so redolent of my childhood and so many vanished moments, may have been a much earlier casualty of The Rival: in the mid-seventies a branch of the latter established itself more or less directly opposite. The memory of that bacon-strewn, cheese-covered loaf dates from around 1981, so I know that the older shop held on for a few more years, at least, though I can't recall precisely when the axe fell.
But what I do know is that since the date of its demise I have never again discovered a loaf with anything like that same sweet taste, so finely balanced between pastry and bread.
Interview with Barney Farmer on the ShortList website here.
Details about Drunken Baker (the novel) here.
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