to have its dinner at night.’ They were also befuddled by the wine list. But then, as Bennett asks plaintively, ‘What kind of wine goes with spaghetti on toast?’6
This partly explains why Britain, more than any other country outside America, was to embrace fast food. It offered the promise of being classless. No waiters, no wine list, no pretentious French terms, no embarrassment about the bill. The first in Britain, opening the year that food rationing ended, was Wimpy. Within a few years it was already starting to change the face of Britain’s high streets and diets, as the Observer reported at the end of the decade: ‘Dirty and lethargic cafés with fly-blown sandwiches and antique sausage rolls have given way to mechanised eating places, though the staff have not always kept pace with jet-age eating.’
Each table came with a wipe-clean menu and the Wimpy signature condiment: a ketchup bottle in the form of a plastic, squeezy tomato; and burgers cost just one shilling and sixpence, the equivalent of a cinema ticket or three loaves of bread – more expensive than it is now in relative terms, but considerably cheaper than a café meal.
The concept, American of course, was brought to Britain by Lyons. In 1958, 5.5 million burgers were sold, enough for one in ten of the population to have eaten a Wimpy that year. What was their success? the newspaper asked. ‘For the customer, particularly the all-important teenager, they are quick, simple and classless. A Wimpy can be eaten in less than ten minutes, leaving the rest of a lunch hour for shop gazing, flirting or jazz.’ Sadly, the nearest today’s office workers get to flirting and jazz at lunchtime is a quick trawl on Facebook.
‘The Wimpy bars, with their bright layout and glass fronts, are inviting and casual, with none of the inhibiting air of posher places. In contrast to the working-class egg-and-chip cafés or middle-class ABCs [Aerated Bread Company tea rooms] the Wimpy bars have the same kind of American class neutrality as TV or Espresso bars.’7
Of course eating out in fast food places, or indeed any places, never became a classless activity. As with so many exciting, new, American activities that hit Britain in this period – pop music, jeans, frozen fish – classless merely became a euphemism for working class. No more so than with fast food, which over time took on a demonic quality, at least in the eyes of those who refused to eat it. Junk food for the junk classes.
This demonisation was mostly peddled by the Wood Burning Stovers, who as time went on were more than happy to have someone else cook their meal in bistros, trattorie and pho noodle bars – but not if it was ‘mechanised’, nor if it was American. McDonald’s, by the sheer force of being successful and American, became the whipping boy. By the mid-1980s, a decade after it arrived in Britain, it was expanding fast, rapidly taking market share from Wimpy and Wendy’s, another chain, and the company wanted to open an outlet in Hampstead, invariably described in tabloid newspapers as ‘leafy’. It is a particularly charming borough of north London, whose heath has majestic views down to the City and Westminster. Home of Keats, Sidney Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Edith Sitwell, it was, in its own estimation, a cut above McDonald’s. There proceeded an almighty 12-year-long row that ended up in the High Court.
‘The last rampart has fallen,’ The Times declared in 1992 when the burger chain finally won the right to open – on the site, symbolically, of a disused bookshop. Everyone quietly forgot that prior to that it had been occupied by a branch of Woolworths. The Hampstead residents, led by local MP Glenda Jackson, the only elected member of parliament to have won an Oscar, and author Margaret Drabble, insisted they were neither being snobs nor prejudiced against burger bars, they just didn’t like the idea of extra traffic and litter. The Heath and Old Hampstead Society said the result would be a rash of copy-cat chains, low-grade boutiques instead of proper shops ‘where one could buy a reel of cotton’.
The true feelings of residents, however, were revealed in a letter to Camden Council, which complained about an influx of ‘noisy undesirables’, while the actor Tom Conti said, ‘McDonald’s is sensationally ugly.’ As the Washington Post rather neatly put it, Hampstead was not so much a village, more a rather smug state of mind. The residents of Hampstead always have been Wood Burning Stovers to a man, Radio 4 devotees, owners of Ottolenghi cookbooks, recipients of organic food boxes. They sip flat white coffees from their local Ginger & White café (slogan: ‘We don’t do Grandes’), which offer organic marmite and soldiers for toddlers who have learnt to order a babycino before they can wipe their own nose.
The article in The Times reporting on the chain’s final victory in NW3 could not hide its outright snobbery: ‘The most valid objection to [McDonald’s] is in fact their ubiquity and the fact that they have done so much in 18 years to debase the act of eating. Many customers are already excavating their purchases as they walk away from the counter, smearing ketchup around their mouths and grabbing handfuls of the deep-fried toothpicks that are parodies of the honest British “chip”.’8
McDonald’s has undergone something of a transformation in the last six or seven years, particularly in Britain. There was certainly a time when I would never have taken my children into one of their outlets, partly because I disapproved of the food’s unhealthiness, partly because I am a reluctant owner of a wood-burning stove and quite like a flat white coffee – and with that comes a fairly large dollop of snobbism. Putting aside the issue of the food, most outlets just weren’t very nice, with harsh strip-lighting, sweaty formica tables and even less healthy-looking customers.
But the McDonald’s of the 1980s and 90s is no more. Partly spurred on by an alarming slippage in profits, partly thanks to a boss in Britain determined to tackle the hostility towards the brand, the restaurants started to go upmarket. The décor in all 1,200 branches was spruced up. Some now even have flowers on the table. The milk went organic, the eggs became free-range. Free WiFi was introduced, when this was an expensive luxury, and espresso and lattes started to be served. Then the recession came along, and it won over hundreds of thousands of new customers determined to continue enjoying a weekly meal out, or a morning cup of coffee on the way in to work, but keen to save money. Eight out of ten families in Britain with children visit at least once a year. My family is now one of those, though that horrifies some fellow north London parents.
There is still an astonishing level of animosity felt towards the golden arches, with much of it class based more than anything else. I interviewed the new British boss, Jill McDonald (no relation), who perhaps rather provocatively compared the burger chain to John Lewis, the epitome of understated Middleton taste on the high street. ‘You get the white van man in the morning stopping in for his egg McMuffin and you get the guy who has stopped off before his meeting with his laptop. There’s not that snobbishness about our brand any more,’ she said.
The reaction to the interview proved that there was still some way to go. ‘Only idiots and chavs go to McDonald’s … nobody but them would take their children there,’ said one online reader, responding to her comments. Another said: ‘I take one look at the customers inside with their noisy and totally uncontrolled offspring and back off quickly. Am I being snobbish? Probably, but I do not want to eat near that lot, nor do I want to walk about the street eating one of their products.’
Despite its move upmarket and its broad appeal to most of the country, McDonald’s will never really win over the Wood Burning Stovers, who like to think the food-on-the-go that they eat is individual, authentic and preferably ‘artisanal’. The fact that it is prepared in a big industrial kitchen on a trading estate in Park Royal, before being shipped out to their local gastro pub or sushi bar, is something they don’t consider. The key demographic for McDonald’s is Asda Mums – a large swathe of the population who straddle what some would call the lower middle class and the upper working class, but now defined in these recessionary times by their loyalty to the cheapest of Britain’s big four supermarkets. Food for Asda Mums is mostly fuel, not a statement of status. Their presiding concern is that their children are well fed, which means nutritiously so (they fret about the sugar content in Fruit Shoots), but
