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At 10.30am onMPYour browser does not support the element. a chilly Saturday the queue outside Manze’s pie-and-mash shop on Deptford High Street stretches 50 metres down the street. The restaurant has been a fixture of the south-east London neighbourhood since 1914, when the current owner’s great-grandfather opened it. Aficionados have come to grab one of the last pies before the place closes permanently on January 25th.Pie-and-mash eateries are a bit of Cockney culture that has existed since Victorian times, when they first popped up in the city’s docklands. Richard Holden, the Conservative for Basildon and Billericay in Essex, even led a debate in Parliament last year on this matter of heritage, calling for pie shops to be given protected intellectual-property status.The fare, sometimes referred to as the “original fast food”, has changed little over the years: an oval meat pie served with a generous helping of mashed potatoes, all swimming in a parsley gravy called “liquor”. Eels, which were once plentiful in the Thames, accompany the pie in either stewed or jellied form. The shops’ interiors are often as standardised as the menu. White tiles cover the walls and black-and-white photos of the original owners may hang behind the bar. Some establishments have sawdust-covered floors and long communal tables or benches.Despite their long history of serving the city’s working class, London’s pie-and-mash shops are at risk of becoming as rare as Cockney rhyming slang. The Pie and Mash Club, a society for the cuisine’s enthusiasts, maintains lists of restaurants that have closed and the dwindling number that remain—fewer than 40 of them in London, down from nearly 300 in the mid-19th century.Deindustrialisation and more recently higher property prices have pushed many of the Cockneys who once inhabited the East End of London out into neighbouring Kent and Essex. Steep rents have made it harder for independent shopkeepers to compete with the chain restaurants that have come to dominate London’s high streets (Manze’s closure coincides with the end of its lease). Although a meal deal of two pies and two servings of mash costs only around £10 ($12) in many London pie shops, the same money can buy a relatively healthy meal at Pret, a chain eatery, or a less healthy one at Greggs, a bakery specialising in sausage rolls.Perhaps the biggest reason for the decline is changing food preferences. Jellied eels are an acquired taste. Young people today might associate pie with the round, thick-crusted variety widely sold in pubs.Still, Beth Mascall, the daughter of George Mascall, Manze’s owner, insists that their pie shop is not closing for any lack of popularity. Her father is ready to retire. But pie and mash has “proved to be a tradition in lots of families, with grandparents bringing grandchildren”, she says, and supporters of nearby Millwall Football Club “have always been attending before the home games”. When your correspondent asked a local queuing for one of Manze’s last pies how he felt about the shop’s closure, he frowned and called it “an end of an era”.
