Part of the Taste and Interdisciplinary Food Studies Network at Westminster seminar series
Militant nostalgia is on the rise across Britain. A specific, instrumentalised memory of what Britain was, and what it should be, is being played out across a broad hegemonic landscape now known as the ‘culture war’. For London’s ‘traditional’ working-class ‘cockney’ communities this trend is synchronous with a closing of the city’s once numerous eel, pie and mash shops, until very recently largely forgotten and often seen as anachronous. They remain, however, vital repositories of largely undocumented but increasingly contested communal memories whose physical buildings, food and rituals speak of identity and authenticity. This seminar seeks to interrogate and clarify the history, significance and culture of the shops. In doing so it further examines their conduit, the adjacent and evolving identity of the cockney whose contested memoryscapes have, I suggest, great contemporary political and cultural relevance in an age of nationalism, moral panics and ‘post-truth’ politics.
Location
Room Regent Street 352, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW.
Nearest station: Oxford Circus
About the speaker
Dr Stuart Freedman
Dr Stuart Freedman is an academic whose PhD research centred around ‘white’ working-class taste, politics, and the rise of the Right. The thesis was the first scholarly work around the ritualised, semi-hidden classed spaces of London’s pie and mash shop and utilised history, memory, sociology and sensory ethnography. Born in East London, he was, for more than thirty years, a photojournalist working primarily in the Global South. He is the author of three books including The Englishman and the Eel.
