Pie & Mash

A part of real London that I’ve never appreciated in terms of taste is pie and mash, though I’ve occasionally photographed the exteriors and interiors of the establishments that serve it, usually when empty. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s I did a fairly extensive survey of shop-fronts and some interiors across London, a few of which (but no pie shops) emerged as a book dummy and later a web project with the improbable title “Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise.”

So I was pleased to see today some fine images of London’s surviving pie and mash shops posted by Stuart Freedman on his Umbra Sumus blog in The Englishman and the eel. These are some of the unused pictures from a feature that was published in the German magazine Effilee, a magazine for eating and living which you can see in a tear sheet Stuart links to.  It’s a good example of how some of the best pictures somehow get missed by editors.  I’m still waiting for him to post his 5,500 word text on his blog in English.

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Although none of my pictures of pie shops made it to ‘Café  Ideal… there is a rather nice pair of teeth from Tooting:

More at  Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise. And this is another project which, with some revisions, I hope will become a print on demand book some time this year.