Since the Middle Ages, food has always been sold on the streets of London. Women and men, boys and girls, have seemingly sold everything that can be eaten, from shellfish and fried fish, to baked potatoes and baked pies, to handfuls of fruit and cups of milk. They were far from being the most respectable members of London’s society, either in the late sixteenth century, the late nineteenth century, or any of the periods in between. Yet they were absolutely an absolutely vital link in feeding the growing population, part of a chain that extended from the coasts, ports, the gardens of Kent and Surrey, and from suburban cows, until finishing its journey in a customers mouth.

In his new book Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London, Charlie Taverner chronicles the daily life of the street vendors over three centuries, following them as they make their way with baskets and carts through the urban landscape. This enables him to not only reimagine a vital part of London’s history, but to reconsider the process of urbanization and modernization. 

Charlie Taverner is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. A social historian of cities and food, he was in a previous life a business and  agricultural journalist. 

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Transcript

Al: Charlie Taverner, welcome to Historically Thinking.

Charlie: Fabulous to be here. Thank you very much.

Al: So I guess we'll talk later about how being a business and agricultural journalist and influenced this book. Imagine I could see it sort of the experience and fingerprints all over it. But this is a book about it's about a business, it's about a centuries of a sort of type of business and one intimately [00:02:00] connected with agriculture, but we're not gonna talk about that yet. As you make clear, the sources of who Hawkers were are very iffy.

They're based on middle class or gentlemen. Taking long walks through the city, making observations, which may or may not be valid, or they're by court cases or whatever. So I think there's the idea, we have the, we should talk about the prototypical vision of the London Fish Wife, which is that seems to be the, that is the vision of the Hawker.

But then going from the fish wife to who were they really, are they the lowest, they can't be the lowest of the lower class, but where are they? Do they fit into the new middling type in the 16th century? Where, who are they? Where do they come from?

Charlie: Yeah, I think I talk about in the book, one of the sections I term all sorts of Londoners. And that's because Hawkers were a really diverse bunch of people. Many of them were very [00:03:00] poor. Really scraping by doing other forms of menial work. Things like sweeping the streets, collecting old bones and rubbish.

Or later on holding up sandwich boards and signs on the streets, basic forms of work. And others were much closer to the kind of shopkeepers people who had a bit more respectability, respectability about them. And a range of complex kind of skills in trades like retail. So you've got a, you've got a wide range of abilities and skill within there.

And what that means is you've got people kind of work doing this work very occasionally, and you've got people just doing this work kind of fulltime. So the job itself can be very different. And it meant also that in there were very different sorts of people involved in the street trade. And one of the big transitions we see is around the gender of street sellers.

So you start off. Early in the early in the period that I'm interested in the late...