The bakery chain Gail's has been busy spreading its sourdough tentacles across London over recent years. It had been doing this successfully and also quietly until it dared to suggest opening a branch in Walthamstow Village whose residents promptly set up a petition to campaign against it. They claim Gail's "bring a risk of overshadowing our much-loved local stores", "could lead to decreased visibility and pedestrian traffic towards independently run businesses" and risk "dismantling the character and diversity crucial to Walthamstow's charm." This is middle class enclave Orford Road, in case you're wondering, not the very long high street with its market and lowbrow mall.
But how far have Gail's spread, where are their strongholds and who pays £4.70 for a loaf of bread? By the end of today's post I should have it all mapped out.
I started at my local Gail's, which isn't especially local.
This is Lauriston Road, a nub of long-term gentrification on the north side of Victoria Park. Walk for ten minutes and you're in the thick of Hackney's council estates, but the closest streets are smart terraces whose residents have a tad more cash to splash. They therefore have a Ginger Pig butcher, a Bottle Apostle off licence and they used to have a tapas restaurant called Spit Jacks until Gail's moved in and started selling sea salt caramel, banana and pecan cake instead. On my visit a steady stream of punters flooded in for coffee and carbs, most for a takeaway option, several with dogs trailing politely behind them. The most quintessentially Gail's moment was when a runner emerged with three bags of sustenance to feed the crew at the independent filmshoot taking place at the artisan grocers across the road. Nothing like this happens where I live.
I checked the locations of the other Gail's bakeries across east London and it turns out there are only five.
Hackney
Victoria Park
Waltham Forest
Redbridge
South Woodford Wanstead
Havering
Tower Hamlets
Spitalfields Canary Wharf
Newham
Barking & Dagenham
Tower Hamlets' two Gail's are in entirely atypical locations - the tourist hub of Spitalfields and a counter inside Waitrose at Canary Wharf. Over in Redbridge Wanstead's an obvious spot for a chichi eaterie, and South Woodford continues a Central line chain which leads to Loughton and Epping across the Essex border. But no other east London neighbourhood is deemed loaded enough to merit a Gail's, not unless they get their way in Walthamstow, whereas I note Newham, Barking & Dagenham and Havering have 18 Greggs between them.
Historically speaking Gail's started out in the 1990s supplying specialised bread for top restaurants. They opened their first bakery in 2005, here on Hampstead High Street.
Unsurprisingly it's still going strong, Hampstead being the absolute epitome of a place that would support an ethical upmarket bread shop. Ole & Steen operate across the street, Paul are just up the road and numerous other posh doughfloggers lie in close proximity, whereas Greggs don't bother coming within a mile of the place. Gail's' window is full of £4-something loaves, bijou gobbets of cake and larger slabs of fluffy stodge, some of them priced, with a further tempting array of sugary comestibles inside. Again the shop's terribly popular, generally with the well-heeled, be that simply to grab a hot drink or to settle at a table with a chunk of calories and watch the world go by. I see Gail's do that pretentious one decimal place thing with their prices, so an iced flat white is 3.9 and something that boils down to eggy soldiers is 8.6.
The geographical spread of Gail's bakeries across London, it turns out, is quite asymmetrical. Central London has a lot more than outer London, even though you might expect the disposable income to be in the suburbs. West London has a lot more than east London, but the capital's wealth gradient has always been that way round. Northwest London is a Gail's desert with only Mill Hill and Barnet as outliers, whereas southwest London supports many more. Be aware this map is always evolving, so for example Woolwich didn't have a Gail's until a month ago, such is the impact Crossrail is having on spending patterns in the town.
I had assumed Gail's only open in pockets of wealth, serving populations where quality of refreshment is more important than price, because if you're going to splash out a tenner on elevenses it might as well taste good. A look at their list of stores in Haringey (Crouch End, Highgate, Muswell Hill) and Richmond (Barnes, East Sheen, Richmond, Teddington, Twickenham) only seemed to confirm this. But then I caught a bus through Willesden and they had a Gail's too, along what otherwise seemed a highly unpromising high street, so I had to assume there must be more to it than that. So it was timely that the Guardian published an article yesterday in which chief executive and co-founder of Gail's, Tom Molnar, explained his rationale.
So yes when Gail's got to Hertfordshire they opened in Berkhamsted, Harpenden, Radlett and St Albans, not Potters Bar, Stevenage and Watford. Similarly Kent meant opening in Royal Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks, not Gravesend and Folkestone, and their so-far rare openings in the north have been in Altrincham, Chester, Didsbury, Knutsford and Wilmslow.
I finished my tour of Gail's at one of their newest branches, opened at Easter in what I thought was the unpromising town of Brentford. Blimey, that's changed.
When Ballymore started knocking down the south flank of the high street to build 900 flats one of the shops they extinguished was a Greggs. Today's regenerated quarter features a super swanky "eatery and supper club" run by a Masterchef contestant and, in pride of place in a converted Victorian warehouse, the inevitable Gail's. They're so chuffed with the architecture that you can pick up a free postcard of the building by the till when you buy your cinnamon bun. The interior decor is all blond wood and exposed brickwork, this apparently the corporate default, with additional seating upstairs for decamping with your croissant and strawberry & basil iced tea. If I were the proprietor of an existing smart cafe locally I'd be nervous, although the lowlier end of the market probably isn't especially worried. Greggs, I notice, simply moved to fresh premises across the road.
In conclusion Gail's may feel ubiquitous but that's only if you spend your time in well-off-ish parts of town. Just under a quarter of their UK branches are in Westminster and Camden (where they started), and about a half in Inner London. Meanwhile there are still twelve London boroughs where the bakery has yet to open, so far including Waltham Forest, and indeed the City of London which I suspect falls foul of their "strong community" requirement. Gail's remains eminently avoidable, and while a teensy pistachio & raspberry bun costs more than an entire Tesco Meal Deal is perhaps best avoided.
