The watery reaches of Buckinghamshire, beloved of bankers and 1980s celebrities, have been subject to so much flooding in recent winters that posh new houses are built to float. Though the future of this countryside is uncertain, the desire for pubs in a town like Marlow remains and Tom Kerridge owns three on the high street: the Hand & Flowers (two Michelin stars, Cornish “tin mine” tart on the menu); the Coach (one Michelin star, turbot scotch egg); and the Butcher’s Tap and Grill, with a sister pub in London’s Chelsea, which is “basically lumps of meat”, as Kerridge puts it. The Butcher has a real butcher’s in the bar area complete with tangy aromas. Men in woollen coats pop in to buy grass-fed bavette steaks and Blur’s The End plays over the sound system. Kerridge is striding down Marlow High Street on a mobile phone, deep in business – then he swings in.
His sweatshirt is covered in mock heavy-metal insignia, running up and down the sleeves like tattoos: a snake on a crucifix, a skeleton-like Iron Maiden’s Eddie. In another life the nation’s most down-to-earth chef would have been in a band. He and his wife, the sculptor Beth Cullen, lived in Camden at the height of the Britpop era: their eight-year-old son Acey (Anglo Saxon for first born) was originally going to be called Jarvis until they realised it didn’t sound great in Cullen’s Stoke-on-Trent accent. Before Britpop, he was a West Country raver. At school he hung out with the bad boys but kept his nose clean: “I was attracted by the naughty boy but I wasn’t a troublemaker. I like hanging around chaos.” Mainstream education didn’t agree with him, and when he won Celebrity Mastermind in 2015 with his specialist subject Oasis, it was the most revision he’d done in his life.
