Pie and Mash on the Leytonstone Arts Trail

Jake Green’s brilliant photographic Pie and Mash project is on display at the Noted Eel and Pie House during the Leytonstone Arts Trail. A couple of years ago, Leytonstoner Jake, set out to photograph all of London’s remaining Pie and Mash shops.

Pie and Mash was once a reliable cheap meal for working Londoners and their children. Wholesome, hot and filling, it took the traditional street food of the wandering pie and eel vendors indoors to tiled and wooden interiored cafes. But over the years the Pie and Mash shops have gradually died away – halving in number in the last 20 years. Jake documented 31 Pie and Mash shops during his project – some of which had closed before it was completed.

When putting together the photos for a limited edition publication, Jake asked me to contribute some text. Not being any kind of authority on Pie and Mash, I instead wrote an account of a walk I devised linking together the sites of former Pie and Mash shops – now variously Fried Chicken joints, a chinese restaurant, a housing estate etc. You can read, The Dead Pie Shop Trail at the exhibition.

Here’s a short extract:

The Dead Pie Shop Trail

It was stood outside A. Cook’s Pie and Mash on Goldhawk Road, boarded up along with an entire strip of small shops, that I decided to pay homage to London’s dead Pie and Mash Shops in the form of a walk—a Dead Pie Shop Trail.

Cook’s played a proud part in the impressive pop cultural history of Shepherd’s Bush. Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols ate there. Viv Albertine of The Slits and Mick Jones of The Clash studied at Chelsea College of Art around the corner in Lime Grove and could well have frequented Cook’s. Phil Daniels whizzed past on his Lambretta with Leslie Ash on the back in the cult mod movie Quadrophenia, in a scene shot directly outside the shop.

The red, drop-shadowed font on the hard white background of the shop front is starting to peel away. ‘Traditional’ in lower-case italics above PIE, MASH, LIQUOR & EELS in elegantly sign-painted capital letters. Like many Pie and Mash Shops it is a work of art in itself. The windows are now boarded up, plastered with bill posters for gigs and clubs.

Instead of a tour of some of the living Pie and Mash Shops captured in this book, I find myself on late winter’s day in West Ham Lane, Stratford, at the site of Lediard’s Pie and Mash shop. Steak Republic now occupies the site. The menu still boasts ‘World Range Pies’, along with milkshakes, gourmet burgers and traditional fish and chips. A fragment of carved stonework from the old building pokes through the gap between the plastic shop signage and First Impression Hair and Beauty Salon next door. The neighbouring stretch of West Ham Lane features numerous food outlets; Mummy Yum Chicken Ribs and Pizza, Top Chef Chinese Cuisine, a Polish Delicatessen, and Burj Chicken and Pizza. There is clearly still a market for cheap and simple food in the area despite Lediard’s demise.

The view West from here towards the next part of the Dead Pie Shop Trail is one of emergent skyscrapers, cranes looming over skeletal towers on the outskirts of Mega City Stratford. The grand old civic buildings of the County Borough of West Ham dating from the early 1900s are boarded up, abandoned. Change is sweeping not only through post-Olympic Stratford but London as a whole. What can we learn from the dead pie shops about the London that’s been lost and the city to come?