They were there, outside the fish and chip shop, all of them. The dad with his household order on a scrappy sliver of paper. The girl of 11 or 12 quietly reciting her own family’s demands, lips miming through lyrics of Mum’s mushy peas and little brother’s Vimto. Teenagers documenting the seconds that passed on mobile phones. They argued over whether gravy on chips was disgusting or not without looking up from their screens. A man of 60 or so joined us, rubbed his hands together and addressed my mum: “You can’t beat Chippy Night can you, love?” For a few splendid minutes, the democracy of the chip-shop queue made everything seem all right.
Mum agreed with the man. It was she who declared this was our Chippy Night, an electric phrase that still, in my early 40s, elicits a cry of “Get in!” and a cheer from my teenage daughter. All three of us were there now, outside the Fisherman’s Wife in York, our nostrils tickled by the smell of batter and vinegar, our eyes drawn to the cosy glow of a fish and chip shop on a dark night. Among the closed shops and curtained windows of Bishopthorpe Road, it gleamed like a gold tooth in a barren mouth.
In order to read the blackboard menu inside, Mum was on her tip-toes now, peeking over a veil of window condensation. I looked at her and realised that I had grown up with this comforting ritual for most of my life. Later, as we emerged from the doorway, my daughter asked if she could carry our bundles of fish and chips home, warming herself on them as she had done since she could walk. Next came the familiar request: “Can I try a chip now, just to check them?”
This most spartan, unfussy and unchanged of meals, and the habit of lining up outside its neon houses, had become a golden-battered thread between all three of us. At times, even the ghost of my grandad comes along, materialising briefly in the stories Mum would repeat about him. “He’d always go in and ask if they left the skin on their fish,” she’d recall. “Then call them ‘Dirty bastards’ if they did.”
We are not alone in this continuity. It is what fish and chips do. Every person in that queue probably had their own stories, memories, habits and connections. If they didn’t, then they were making them now. At different times as we waited, all of us peered through the condensation at what was happening inside. It transported me backwards, hurtling through time, to an age younger than my daughter is now. There I was, 12 years old, with my friend Richard beside me, both of us watching what looked like bleary ghosts bobbing around inside the chip shop. Queueing up after our visits to the swimming baths, a seductive aroma would drift out from the shop each time the door opened, a movement which also set free the melodic refrain of a chip lifter tinkling against the frying range. Once inside, we’d see that our bobbing ghosts were the white-coated women who worked behind the counter. Then, we’d await the heavenly call of “Who’s next, please?”, a sound even sweeter than a fire alarm during double chemistry.
Perhaps the fact that I find such comfort and calm in fish and chip shops was inevitable – and even biological. Their very existence is tethered to mine. Just over a century ago my great-grandma, working in the family chippy in Wetherby, and my great-grandad, queueing for his tea, locked eyes for the first time. Courting followed and then came marriage, I hope with scraps thrown as confetti.
Running chip shops – or “fish shops” as they, West Yorkshire folk, would call them – became something of a family trade. For not much outlay, owning one offered a ladder to relative riches for people who usually hacked coal for a living.
Sitting in her chair, a myna bird in the cage beside her, my great-grandma would later tell of her days at the frying range, powered by coal and then newspaper when that ran out. In her 90s by the 1990s, she talked about chip-shop prices between the wars and how their business sold nothing but the basics – mushy peas came later, a flashy extravagance. This was Yorkshire, after all.
Eventually, family shops were sold and ours became a story from the other side of the range – that of Chippy Night and childhood enchantment. We are eaters, not makers.
Through separate stages of life flow different chip-shop traditions. When we three queue now, we are blissfully partaking in the latest rituals. Who knows, one day I may queue with my own grandchildren and bamboozle them with the very concept of drinking dandelion and burdock. Chip shops grant that sense of the unchanging and the concrete – of the being sure of something – that is central to feeling anchored. Each one is also pleasingly different to the next, a deep-fried republic, something revitalising in a country of unvarying high streets. This much is symbolised in the regional variations offered across the land: Wolverhampton’s orange chips, Hull’s chip spice, Cumbrian patties. They are tiny, shimmering and gurgling societies of their own, focal to the communities that surround them. They are also an endangered species.
Our chippies have faced desperate times before, but none so difficult as these. In 2022, such was the saddening and alarming rate at which they were closing, the National Federation of Fish Friers warned of “potentially an extinction event”. Sarson’s, the vinegar manufacturer, predicted that half the UK’s 10,500 chip shops would be gone by 2025. This has always been a backbreaking trade of long hours, but in recent times external, uncontrollable factors have worsened the load.
Last year, a combination of post-Brexit supply-chain difficulties, a shortage of cheap raw materials resulting from the war in Ukraine and severe energy cost rises made running a chip shop an arduous undertaking. More recently, the UK’s relentlessly wet autumn and winter greatly damaged the potato crop, meaning what has survived will cost owners more. Oil prices continue to rise, too.
For customers, the central repercussion is a stark increase in the price of this traditionally affordable treat. Even takeaway fish and chips has, in many places, climbed above the psychologically sacrosanct £10 barrier. Perhaps we need to stop thinking of this as a cheap and cheerful meal. All the same, a tenner for something so gladdening, tasty and filling does represent good value. Especially, that is, if you do as my family has always done and reheat leftover chips for butties the next day.
There may be some who see this demise as an inevitable, irreversible trend and even a consequence of market forces. As a nation, our tastes have broadened and there have never been so many alternative genres of cuisine. Yet this dish still matters, too, offering something shared, something so many of us love now or associate with fond memories. Fish and chips have the soft power to bind many of us together, even if it is just for a two-minute conversation about vinegar or pickled onions as we queue.
With the same adherence to simple, quality ingredients, and with their usual resilience, fish and chip shops can and will survive. The burden is more on us, as customers, to join the queue and stumble upon new traditions.
Back when I was 12, my friend and I would emerge from the ghosts’ chippy with paper bales of the good stuff. Chip heat reanimated our cold and chlorine-crimped fingers. Batter flew smoke signals into the dank evening, steam-drying our uncombed and sodden hair. We ambled cautiously onwards, scoffing ravenously, but guarding our packages. Eating outside extinguished etiquette. Under the sky, we could talk with our mouths full and pincer our food with eager fingers. Wooden forks were plunged into a plump chip and left dormant, tiny Excalibur swords welded into Maris Pipers.
Further traditions followed. There was the chip shop on Essex Street, Middlesbrough, that Dad and I would visit after watching our beloved Middlesbrough FC lose again. It offered the hot glee of chips from what appeared to be the front room of a terrace house. Then, when my parents split, Mum introduced Tuesday Treat Night to cheer that dreary day – few dishes, or indeed pursuits, equalled the battered comfort of a chippy visit. In young adulthood, there was time spent with my grandma in the Wetherby Whaler, a few metres from where my great-grandma met her love, and home to smooth batter and chips with a week’s worth of flavour. After I left York for Newcastle University, those familiar vinegar scents and flashing signs in my new city made it feel less far from home.
Then, some years later, a minor parental miracle of the type that doesn’t matter yet matters enormously happened. The toddler who called me “Daddy” loved the golden food she shared with me one afternoon while sitting on my knee in a Whitby fish and chip restaurant. Soon, we found a place to go, a local. Sitting opposite one another, her young conversation percolating, ordering from the small menu and the big one became a weekly occasion – usually after swimming, of course. Fish and chips had become our thing.
Travelling across the country to research my book, in Dundee and Devon, in Bethnal Green and Blackpool and in many places besides, I learned that these were not my feelings and experiences alone. Everywhere families and friends, people falling in love and people who just wanted to get out for a bit, were revelling in their visits to chip shops and restaurants. They had their own rituals, from the outlets they visited to the way they dressed and doused their meals, and their own routines. Somehow these places, and fish and chips, belonged to them.
In a health-conscious world this may seem alien, and even reprehensible. Arteries were probably harmed in the making of my book. Yet the mental health benefits of a moderate chip-shop habit are serious and many. Here is something calming and connecting, something shared and constant. Something ever-present upon a planet shuddering in chaos and flux. Whenever we see those two words separated by an ampersand lit up on some damp night, we chippy types are home, wherever we may be.
Food of the Cods: How Fish & Chips Made Britain by Daniel Gray is published by HarperNorth at £12.99. Buy it for £11.43 at guardianbookshop.com
