The Fish and Chips Index
What the price of an iconic food says about London’s insane cost of living
By Musa Okwonga
There are moments when you realize your city has changed beyond recognition, possibly forever. A few weeks ago, walking through London’s Borough Market, I saw a restaurant that was charging £15.50 for a plate of fish and chips. Fish and chips — the cheap staple food of any seaside resort, and here it was, as expensive as a fillet steak. I shouldn’t have been as taken aback as I was: after all, London is now a place where you can find champagne bars in Stratford, a part of town where, when walking home at night, you once made sure to walk under every single streetlight. But I’d always thought that, in a world of ever-soaring prices — just wait for the day that they start charging a pound for a Mars bar, it may be on us soon enough — the humble plate of fish and chips would be the last thing to go gourmet.
Perhaps I’m just being churlish. It just seems that, wherever you look in this city, there’s a new example of eye-watering expense. Nowhere is this more insistent than property, with London rents rising at five times the rate of the rest of the country. As a result, the funereal suburb where I spent my teens has now become a bustling commuter town, as workers with stretched salaries are forced to live further and further from central London; presumably in search of cheaper fish and chips.
Of course, there is nothing new about gentrification. What seems different about this, though, is its sheer speed. Just a few years ago, Kilburn and Peckham were areas where you were best advised to tread carefully; now they are some of the most sought-after places to live — if you’re sufficiently affluent.
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It’s difficult not to look upon this era with some sadness. Once, people of vastly varying means could live reasonably close to London’s center: It was this blend that gave the city much of its cultural richness. Now we’re in an era where, to paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, cash rules everything around here… and London, for all its material wealth, is much the poorer for that fact.
