Shops
Originally there were no shops, and all trade was done from braziers or carts within the alleys of East London. It was not until late Victorian times that shops began to be developed.
Traditionally pie and mash shops have white tile walls, with marble floors, tables and work tops, which are easy to clean and give a Victorian appearance. It is presently estimated that there are around 80 pie and mash shops in and around London and the Southeast.
In 1890 Albert Goddard founded what is now the longest running pie and mash shop in Deptford. Goddard's Pie Shop relocated to Greenwich in 1952, and it is still like many such shops family owned. The longest open pie and mash shop is M. Manze's, which opened in 1902 on Tower Bridge Road. As the family expanded so did the chain to five shops, but today it has three locations all owned by members of the same original family.
With the large number of pleasure boat steamer companies offering Sunday trips on the River Thames, many Eastenders choose to go west and explore the more gentrified west of London. The result was that many also wanted their traditional foods of ale and pie and mash, resulting in the renaming of both a hotel that they visited and the island on which it sat in Twickenham to Eel Pie Island in the early 1900s.
The pies, mashed potato and stewed eels are all prepared on the premises, but it is the eel sauce liquor that most family owners make differently, and most customers will distinguish the difference from shop to shop.
Read more about this topic: Pie And Mash
Famous quotes containing the word shops:
“I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It’s just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it’s also an affirmation of faith in their country, its prosperity and limitless bounty. They have shops the way that lesser countries have statues.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.”
—Ralph Hodgson (c. 1871–1962)