Street food as we know it has a decidedly international flavour. Aromatic Ethiopian stew, mildly spiced Egyptian falafel, bao buns and po'boys - taste buds can travel the world in a lunch hour. London dominates the UK's street food scene, home to six of the country's 10 most popular locations , including the top three markets of Borough, Broadway and Seven Dials.
According to the Nationwide Caterers Association, "the street food revolution took grip of London and spread throughout the nation. "And now it’s everywhere." Street food, though, has been a thing in the capital ever since both streets and food existed.
People with no kitchen at home could get a warm meal by patronising one of the numerous hawkers selling their wares. London Particular (a thick soup), eel jelly, batter pudding, oysters, and watercress were all eaten on the hoof - and sometimes with the hoof, in the form of boiled pigs' trotters. Here are some of the delights of the capital's long history of eating on the street.
Oysters Famously going from cheap food for poor people to luxury food beloved of investment bankers, oyster have been eaten in London since toga-clad Romans strolled about enjoying the tasty bivalve molluscs (shells are routinely found in excavations within the Square Mile). Journalist Henry Mayhew, in his observational book London Labour and the Poor, published in the 1840s, said costermongers sold 24,000,000 oysters a year, and "these, at four a penny, would realise the large sum of £129.