Are our chippies under threat?

BRITAIN may have been built on potatoes, but it was fuelled by fish n’ chips.

The classic dish does exactly what it says on the tin, and generations have happily tucked into a slab of battered cod and a tray of chips swimming in salt and vinegar.

And that’s just the tip of a simple but universally loved culinary iceberg.

Mushy peas, spam fritters, chip butties, chips n’ gravy, battered sausage, jumbo sausage, chicken pie, steak pie, pickled onion, pickled egg, and for the more sophisticated types, a piece of plaice. Or, if you’re Scottish, a deep-fried Mars bar.

What’s not to like?

As a kid, buying a cone of chips after a cold autumnal evening of roaming the streets could be a life-affirming experience.

What strange alchemy could turn a humble potato into such golden, tasty and warming slices of joy?

Yet sadly, the great British chip shop is under threat.

The rising costs of ingredients such as cod and haddock, which have doubled over recent years, a surge in overhead costs, tax pressures, and a change in consumer habits have seen an alarming number of chippies fry their last and shut up shop.

A survey this year by the National Federation of Fish Friers (NFFF) found that 19% of owners planned to leave the industry within 12 months.

Nearly 45 percent expressed deep concerns about the future and said they were extremely worried about how rising food prices, wages and taxes were forcing them under.

Fish n’ chip shops aren’t there to rip you off, but like everyone else, they’re being hit by a cost of living crisis that seems to want us all dead.

Strangely enough, the demise of the great British chippy was highlighted only recently in Venice’s national newspaper, Il Gazzettino.

The interesting thing is the paper highlighted the downfall of a national institution with a picture of Abergavenny school kids in 1981 getting stuck into some choice cuts from the Fish & Chips van that used to do the rounds back in the day.

We'd love to say we sit around the newsroom all day like batmen in our bat caves, scouring the worldwide media for mere mentions of Abergavenny before we jump into action, but no! The article was brought to our attention by an eagle-eyed gent called Christopher Hamilton.

He explained, "Hardly ‘hold the front page,’ but yesterday, in Venice’s daily paper Il Gazzettino, an article on a crisis affecting fish and chip shops in the UK (competition from fast food, rising prices for ingredients) was accompanied by a 1981 photo of schoolchildren eating fish and chips in Abergavenny! I wonder where they are now? Apart from being big in Venice and in yesterday’s fish and chip paper."

For the sake of clarity and the stray Gen Z reader out there, it should be noted that in the days when people used to buy newspapers, they'd quite often eat their fish supper out of them too, but that's neither here or there.

What is here is the picture in question. We'd love to be able to show you the full version as opposed to the cropped one that appears in Il Gazzettino, but Getty owns the rights, and if we did publish it, we would get swiftly and silently executed by higher powers.

Never fear. All is not lost. Follow this link, take a butcher's at the aforementioned pic in all its glory, and see if you recognise anyone.

Let us know, and maybe we can re-stage the pic all these years later with the original gang and treat everyone involved to a bag of chips!