I was in Brentwood yesterday and walked past a Wenzel's bakery in the main street. Oh they're in Essex now, I thought. When Wenzel's started up they were very much a northwest London thing, but I've seen a lot more of their bakeries elsewhere recently. How have they spread this far?
So I drew some maps.
I've been meaning to do this for a long time.
The first Wenzel's bakery was opened by Peter Wenzel in Sudbury Hill in 1975. This became the epicentre of the expanding Wenzelverse. But at the time it was just a single shop with no aspiration towards dough domination.
It's hard to determine how and when the chain first expanded, but there are ways to dig back. It seems Wenzel's first launched a website in 2008 - all very minimal - and by searching back within the Wayback Machine I can see what the store list was.
Our stores are in Pinner, Northwood, Joel Street, Harrow, Rayners Lane, Sudbury, North Harrow, Wealdstone, South Harrow, Ruislip and Watford.
Joel Street is in Northwood Hills, if you were wondering.
So just the 11 stores in 2008.
Here they are on a map.
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Wenzel's is very much a northwest London bakery at this point, with the majority of stores in or around Harrow along the arms of the Metropolitan line. The original Sudbury Hill store is the black star at the bottom of the map. The only real outlier is on Watford High Street in Hertfordshire. It's taken the brand over 30 years to get to this point, and if you'd never been to the northwestern suburbs you'd never have noticed them.
There are now 34 Wenzel's bakeries, still with a Metropolitan line focus but now with a greater spread beyond. The business has crept closer to central London with stores in Wembley, plus a bold move into a unit inside Baker Street station. To the south the three lone wolves are Greenford, West Ealing and Yiewsley. To the northeast there's a new cluster around Edgware and a distant store in Radlett. And to the northwest there's Rickmansworth and also Amersham, the first Wenzel's beyond the M25. It's a statement of intent...
That's quite an expansion! There are now 72 Wenzel's bakeries, essentially a doubling, as the chain exerts its dominance over northwest London. There's been a spread into north London, also a nudge closer to the centre. Proper Home Counties outposts now exist in High Wycombe, Aylesbury, Luton and Stevenage. However nothing's opened south of the M4, also Wenzel's is still avoiding east London where rival chain Percy Ingle has just gone bust.
The Essex star isn't in Chigwell or Loughton but in Debden, which is much more target audience. There are also two further eastern stores I've had to chop off my map, one in Romford and the other in Brentwood. It turns out the Wenzel's I saw yesterday has been there for a while, indeed it opened exactly five years ago in January 2021.
There are now 111 branches, very much no longer confined to the old Middlesex stomping ground. The bakery has now reached commuter towns like Basingstoke, Billericay and Basildon, even Guildford and Woking, in its search for fresh markets to tap.
But what I've not shown you are the additional dozen openings that lie off the edge of even this expanded map, for example the northernmost Wenzel's is now in Northampton. More extraordinarily they've opened bakeries along the south coast in Portsmouth and Southampton, even Bournemouth and Poole, almost 100 miles from the original store in Sudbury Hill. Most of these farflung extras are actually in out of town retail parks rather than on high streets, thus catering for a somewhat different clientele. You can check the spread on my summary Google map, it's got all these branches on.
Finally here's the map I really wanted to draw - the expansion of Wenzel's 1975 → 2008 → 2016 → 2021 → 2026.
This is a bakery chain on the up, both expanding its coverage and also filling in the gaps. No wonder Peter Wenzel received an official Outstanding Contribution to the Baking Industry accolade at the Baking Industry Awards last year.
There's still a lot further Wenzel's could spread, so if you haven't seen the orange bakery in your town yet it might be on its way. But I note that London south of the Thames appears to be resolutely and deliberately out of bounds (which reminds me, I really should draw some Coughlans maps one day).
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