A history of Londoners’ relationship with food & drink

Food is an integral part of London’s history, and everyone has some relationship with it. Running from May 2020 to July 2021, we ran a year-long thematic collecting project within the Curating London programme.

Called London Eats, the project aimed to understand and reflect upon Londoners’ relationship with food and drink through new collecting.

This prompted us to look at related items in our collection. Here, we explore some of the objects we have, which stories they tell, and what is their relevance to Londoners today?

What we eat can be an indicator of sharp inequalities. Even in a city of plenty, many still go hungry.

While oysters today are on the menus of London’s finest restaurants, in previous centuries they were eaten by wealthy and poor people alike. In the medieval times for example, they were viewed as a medicinal food and given in quantity to London’s hospital inpatients. Back then oysters were so cheap and plentiful that they were the food stuff of the very poorest.

This small loaf of bread was given to a Suffragette serving a term of imprisonment for militant action in Holloway Prison. She kept it, uneaten, as a souvenir. Many of the 1,000 Suffragettes who went to prison in their struggle for the right to vote refused to eat, and often drink, to force a response from the authorities.

The Suffragette hunger strike protest, which led to the brutal force-feeding by the authorities, remains one of the most poignant and disturbing aspects of the Votes for Women campaign.

All eyes are on the young woman who works in this public house in this satirical print by John Collett. At the centre, an elderly officer raises a spoon from a custard cup to his mouth as he stares at the serving woman. Custards in the 18th century were often eaten from delicate little glasses, and could be creamy or set, sweet or savoury. In the background you can see bowls, bottles, glasses and lemons.

The opening of tea houses such as Lyon’s in the early 20th century revolutionised eating out by providing women with respectable, safe and affordable places to eat and relax.

Food can transform a gathering into a celebration, connecting people across time and space. Past and present migrations have shaped what we eat and drink today. Coming together to eat or drink can also be a catalyst for change.

This drawing shows customers in the Atlantic pub in Coldharbour Lane in Brixton in 1980. The Atlantic pub was one of the first in Brixton to employ Caribbean women as staff. It became very popular with the local West Indian community, especially as many pubs in London refused to serve African and Caribbean people in the 1950s and 60s.

It was a very cosmopolitan space where people from different backgrounds met – the son of the pub’s English landlord married a West Indian woman in 1965.

By the 1970s, the Atlantic became known as Brixton’s most visibly Black pub, and an unofficial community centre.

From around 1600, many Flemish and Dutch gardeners moved to the Surrey bank of the Thames to Battersea, Bermondsey and Wandsworth to plant a variety of crops such as cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips and parsnips. This success marked the beginning of intensive market gardening in London, driven by migrants teaching English gardeners new skills and cultivation techniques.

By the early 18th century, common vegetables were very cheap and were beginning to be used by all as an accompaniment to meat. Prior to this they have been used only as a staple food of the poorer classes who couldn't afford meat. By the end of the 18th century, fruit and vegetables were in daily use by every section of society.

During the Second World War, a shortage of grain to feed hens led to eggs becoming rationed. Nicknamed ‘Ersatz eggs’, dried eggs began to be imported from the US. This tin contains the equivalent of 12 eggs, and a family would have been allowed to purchase one of these tins every eight weeks, alongside their fresh egg ration.

Government campaigns tried to convince sceptical housewives that they were just as tasty and wholesome as the real thing. Even in London, many families resorted to keeping their own hens to have fresh eggs instead.

By looking at how food is produced, consumed and disposed of we can learn more about London’s past, present and future.

This is a caricature of a British sugar planter settled in Jamaica to earn their fortune. His body is made from produce – his chest a barrel of Jamaica Rum, his arms and thighs made from sugar loaves. He sits on a barrel of molasses while enslaved Africans work in fields in the background.

The sugar plantations of the Caribbean and their use of enslaved labour was driven by the British craving for sugar. Even after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, it took another 26 years to emancipate those already enslaved. Once emancipated, slaves received no compensation and were expected to work without wages for a further number of years to ‘earn’ their own freedom.

This polystyrene takeaway container was designed to enjoy a takeaway portion of rollmops, fish balls or other items at the famous Kosher restaurant, Blooms.

Blooms opened in Whitechapel, the heart of London’s Jewish community, in the 1920s and established a further branch to serve the local Jewish residents of Golders Green, until it eventually closed in 2010.

More recently, many charities campaign against polystyrene and other plastics which have a detrimental impact on the environment. The EU is set to ban expanded polystyrene, oxo-degradable plastics and some plastic items with its EU Single Use Plastics Directive. In the UK, the devolved administrations will develop their own appropriate measures.

We hope you found this exploration of food culture and history through a peek into our collection interesting. In the London Eats project, we collected over 150 physical and digital objects for our collections of art, dress and textile, photography, oral history, digital, social and working history, and ephemera.

Domenico Sergi is Senior Curator, Curating London, and Vyki Sparkes is & Curator, Social and Working History at London Museum.