Bite Me - London's Best Street Food - The Upper Crust & Underbelly

It's all about London's great street food in this episode. We start with a famous Earl who named the humble sandwich. John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, is remembered not for his long career at the Admiralty, nor for giving Hawaii its first English name, but for a piece of bread with meat inside it. 

We follow that legacy into the broader story of London's street food - from Roman oyster shells in the mud of Londinium to the eel pie shops of the Victorian East End, the surprisingly global origins of fish and chips, and the foods that didn't survive long enough to be romanticized. 

We visit the George & Vulture Pub, Cornhill, home of the Earl of Sandwich's Hellfire Club, The Red Lion, Barnes - the pub running the world's biggest sausage roll competition. 

We trace the line from a jellied eel to the birth of British rock and roll, and ask why the oyster went from the food of the poor to the food of the privileged while the whelk just disappeared. 

Plus the best street food markets in London, and where to find the city's finest fish and chips.

Transcript

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April seventh, seventeen seventy nine. London, outside the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, the crowd spills out. Lords, ladies, servants, coachmen. A man in black waits among them, two loaded pistols in his hands. For four years he has been obsessed with a woman, a celebrated soprano, a mother of five. When she emerges he pushes through the crowd and fires at point blank range. She dies instantly. He turns the second pistol on himself, fails, then bludgeons his own head until he's dragged away. Her name was Martha Ray. She was thirty-four. She was also the mistress of John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, one of the most powerful men in England. This is your host, Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn't make it onto the highlight reel, the London that's hidden in plain sight if you know where to look. Today's episode is about food, specifically portable food, the kind you eat with your hands, food that doesn't normally require a table or a plate. And before the emails start, I'm not a complete peasant. I recognize it's not acceptable to walk and shove food into your open moor. Grab and go is the category, not grab and eat on the run. We'll begin with this man's sandwich, a name larger than life. Act one, the most famous Earl. John Montague, the fourth Earl of a Sandwich, was born in 1718. His father died when he was four. His grandmother fled to Paris with what remained of the family money. By age ten, he was a ward of the court. He attended Eton and Cambridge, left without a degree, and set off on a grand tour that took him beyond France and Italy to Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, unusual, even risky for 1738. On his return he took his seat in the House of Lords, and soon joined the notorious Hellfire Club, founded by his friend Sir Francis Dashwood. Officially called the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wickham, the club initially met at the Georgian Vulture Inn in the city of London, William Hogarth, John Wilkes, and possibly Benjamin Franklin among its early members. The Georgian Vulture at Three Castle Court, EC three V 9AE takes some finding because it's down a narrow passageway between buildings and signage is minimal. There's been an inn on this site since 1152. It's a grade two listed Samuel Smith's pub where Dickens drank and included it in the Pickwick Papers. Today it serves lunch only, weekdays only, and its menu has not deviated substantially from roast beef in the better part of a century. Book ahead. The upper floor is reportedly home to a phantom woman who drifts along its corridors. Montague twice served as first Lord of the Admiralty, overseeing one of the longest tenures at the head of the Royal Navy. He improved naval record keeping backed merit over patronage and supported the shipbuilding program that underpinned British sea power. He also financially and politically supported Captain Cook's voyages. When Cook reached a group of islands in the Pacific in 1778, he named them the Sandwich Islands. We know them today as the American state of Hawaii. In 1741, Montague married Dorothy Fain. Her mental health declined through the 1750s, leading to their separation on her confinement to psychiatric care. She died in 1758, leaving Montague a widower in his late 30s, with his domestic life in ruins. Martha Ray, Montague's mistress, entered his life shortly before Dorothy's death. Martha was a Milner's apprentice with a gifted singing voice. Montague arranged for her to study under the Italian composer Giardini. She became an accomplished soprano, a fixture in some of London's most distinguished private drawing rooms. By the early 1760s, she was living with Montague. Over 19 years she became his partner, ran his household, and bore at least five surviving children. She occupied a position the 18th century had no good word for, not quite a wife, not merely a mistress. When Martha was shot outside the Theatre Royal, her killer, a clergyman named James Hackman, was executed within weeks. Public sympathy, however, often favored Hackman, while Ray was reduced to a footnote. Buried in an unmarked grave, she was mourned deeply by Montague, who never recovered from her death. Despite his long career and scandals, Montague is remembered above all for one enduring legacy, the sandwich. A great story, but likely untrue. Historian N. A. M. Roger suggests it was more likely invented at Sandwich's desk, where long hours as First Lord of the Admiralty demanded quick, practical meals. The gambling story comes from a single secondhand source, a French travel book published in 1772. The truth is less colorful, but the myth endured. While the sandwich became his legacy, it was just one of many portable foods emerging in the period. And fun fact, Montague's descendants are now running a fast food chain named after him in American shopping malls. Act 2. Britain's Greatest Street Food Snacks. Street food. We think of this today as ready-to-eat food or drink prepared and sold by vendors in public spaces, such as streets, market, or transport hubs, designed to be affordable, portable, and eaten on the go, often without the need for formal seat-in or utensils. Turns out not much has changed with street food since Roman times. Street food in London dates back to Roman Londinium, where most people had no kitchens and relied on vendors for daily meals, evidenced by oyster shells found in digs across the city. By the 11th century, cookshops were selling pies, tarts, and pasties filled with meats like veal, goose, and goat. By the 13th century, a bustling street food culture had emerged. Feeding workers with roasted meats, fish, and fried dough. Medieval authorities attempted regulation through laws like the assize of bread and ale, ensuring fair pricing and quality. Between the 16th and early 20th centuries, hawkers of food carried baskets, pushed wheelbarrows, and set up stalls right across the metropolis, selling mackerel, mussels, oranges, cherries, turnips, muffins, puddings and pies. In underserved areas like the East End, street vendors were essential, supplying communities without access to formal food markets. Their trade was lively but often unhygienic, with food carried openly through crowded streets. The Industrial Revolution of the Victorian era transformed street food from a convenience into a lifeline. As London's population surged, many workers without home kitchens depended on vendors selling hot, cheap meals like pea soup and hot eels. Other favorites were pickled whelks, sheep's trotters, and gooseberry pie. Despite its importance, street eating became associated with the working class and carried social stigma. Post-war immigration reshaped London street food, introducing global influences like the Donna Kebab in the 1970s. A modern revival driven by the farmers market movement and social media has since elevated street food into something fashionable. It's become respectable, even middle class, to eat a sausage in a bun, providing the sausage was rare breed, and the bun a hand-drawn sourdough. Today London has around 10,000 individual street food vendors serving global cuisines, dishing out everything from Gujarati snacks and Vietnamese ban mi tourmet ice cream. London's street food scene reflects its diversity, but its core purpose remains unchanged. Quick, accessible food for a city on the move. From Roman oysters to organic quinoa patties, the hunger and the hustle has never really changed. Here's just a few of Britain's favourite street foods. The Sausage Roll. The sausage roll has no grand origin story. It likely emerged in the early 19th century as a practical solution. Wrap leftover sausage meat in pastry and bake it. Simple and perfect. Victorian versions were basic pork in hot water crust, sold by street vendors, bakeries, and railway stations, feeding a mobile population. Today they're everywhere. Greg's alone sells over two million each week. Look around you next time you're in London. Notice anyone eating one on the street? At its best, when serious culinary minds turn their attention to the humble pastry wrapped snack, the sausage roll becomes something more. And for that, we have to go to Barnes. Barnes, a quiet riverside village in southwest London. It's home to something unexpected. Since 2013 it's grown into the world's biggest sausage roll competition. Created by the pub managers Angus McKean and Claire Morgan, it's part serious cooking and part a playful spectacle. Chefs from across the UK, pub cooks, hotel chefs, Michelin-starred veterans, they all compete live, serving creations that range from refined to surreal, judged by critics and chefs, with proceeds going to charity. Entries range from the extraordinary to the surreal. Norfolk quail with saffron pickled quail egg, or pork and haggis with spicy ketchup. That one was called the Kilted Wonder, and it came third in its year. The 2024 winner, a Battenberg-inspired creation by Scottish chef Alan Payton, made with squares of Suffolk Duroc pork and black pudding, with Yorkshire rhubarb curd, served with a cracklin crumb. The 2023 champion, Master Chef winner Matt Folas, went with a Sunday roast sausage roll. Local pork sausage meat with slow cooked onions, bacon, and a secret spice mix, topped with a pork cracklin crumb and served with Sunday roast gravy for dipping. Even outside the event, the Red Lion at Two Castle Nye, SW139RU remains a standout pub. Proof that even the humblest food can inspire serious creativity. One of England's greatest culinary contributions comes from Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. The town has protected geographical indication status for its pork pies. This means a pie can only be called a Melton Mowbray pork pie if it's made within a specific area of Leicestershire using fresh uncured pork and a hot water crust pastry formed by hand. Medieval in origin, it took its modern form in the eighteenth century when Leicestershire farmers producing large quantities of Stilton cheese found the cheesemaking whey was an excellent feed for pigs. The pie is built for keeping. The hot water pastry forms a self-supporting crust. The pork is jellied inside with aspic, and the whole thing travels well, and it is said that it will keep for days without refrigeration. Don't take my word for that. It's meant to be eaten cold, not as a compromise, but by design. Next up, a lowly snack with uncertain origins, an upper crust or underbelly. No one knows for sure, but one source is adamant. The Scotch egg a disputed origin. Fortnumer Mason, the Piccadilly department store that has been feeding the aristocracy since 1707, claims to have invented it in 1738, as a travelling snack for long coach journeys. The idea? A hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs, and deep fried. Self-contained, portable, no plate required. Whether Fortnum's actually invented it or simply claims the credit is a matter of debate. The name Scotch Egg's got nothing to do with Scotland. The most plausible etymology connects it to scotched, an old English term meaning minced or processed. The dish appears in cookery books from the early 1800s as working-class street food, sold at market stalls and outside pub yards, eaten standing up with your hands. Today the Scotch egg has undergone a full gastropub rehabilitation. A properly made one, runny yoked, well-seasoned sausage meat, genuinely crunchy, breadcrumb crust is one of the greatest bar snacks invented. The Cornish pasty. A portable food at its most ingenious. Yes, it comes from Cornwall, specifically the tin and copper mines of Cornwall. It was the work in miners' lunch for centuries. The crimped edge had a practical purpose beyond aesthetics. Mine workers' hands were contaminated with arsenic from the tin ore. They held the pasty by the thick, crimped crust, ate the fill in from the unsealed end, and discarded the crust when they were done. In traditional versions, one end was savory and the other end was sweet, jam, apple fruit, a full meal sealed in pastry for the journey down the mine. Like the Melton Mowbray pork pie, the Cornish pasty now holds protected geographical indication status. To be called a Cornish pasty, it must be made in Cornwall, filled with beef skirt, potato, swede or rutabega, and onion, and crimped along the side, but not the top. The crimpin is the signal. Anything else is just a pasty. If you're crimping your pasties along the side, then you're making a Cornish pasty. If you're crimping your pasties along the top, then you're making a Devonshire pasty. All clear? Next up a story of empire, migration, poverty and the railway network. I must of course be referring to what else but fish and chips. Act three Fish and Chips. The story of fish and chips begins not in England at all, but in Portugal. In the 15th century the Spanish Inquisition expelled the Jews of Spain. Many fled to Portugal. When Portugal followed suit a few years later, they fled again, some of them to England, the Netherlands, and beyond. Food historian Claudia Roden in her book The Book of Jewish Food 1997 and John Cooper in his book Eat and Be Satisfied, A Social History of Jewish Food, 1993, they both confirmed that Jewish immigrants brought a dish called pescado frito, white fish, usually cod, dipped in a thin coat of flour and fried in oil. The dish had a practical origin. Jewish law prohibits cooking on the Sabbath, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Frying fish on Friday afternoon when the batter preserved it so it could be eaten cold the following day was a solution to a religious requirement that also produced something genuinely delicious. By the 18th century, fried fish was being sold on the streets of London's East End. Charles Dickens references a fried fish warehouse in Oliver Twist, published in 1838. Not a restaurant, not a market store, a warehouse. This gives you some sense of the scale of the trade. At this point you might think fish came from Jewish immigrants, but chips? They're British, right? Well, partly true. Potatoes themselves are not native to the UK. They were brought from Peru by Sir Walter Raleigh in the 16th century. Thick cut fried chips did emerge in northern England as cheap fuel for factory workers. The earliest northern chip shop on record was a wooden hut at Mosley Market in Lancashire near Oldham, opened around 1863 by a man named John Lees. But chips also appeared in London in the eighteen sixties, alongside Jewish run fish shops like Joseph Malin's, opened on Cleveland Way within the sound of bow bells in the eighteen sixties. Their deeper origins are debated. It's thought that the potato was first fried as a substitute for nutritious fish during the winter of sixteen eighty when the river Meuse, in today's Belgium, froze over. In Britain, one source says that it was French Protestants fleeing religious persecution in the seventeenth century, that's the Huguenots, they might have brought their taste for fried potato with them to the UK, with many settling in the east end of London. For Britain at least, it turns out the invention of the chippy is the true north-south divide. What cannot be disputed, however, is what happened next. Two technologies changed everything, steam trawlers and railways. Industrial scale fishing met fast transport, bringing cheap, fresh fish inland from the ports of Hull, Grimsby, and Aberdeen to every city within hours. By the 1920s, Britain had 35,000 fish and chip shops. George Or, writing in the Road to Wigan Pier, in 1937, cited fish and chips alongside cheap cinema seats as one of the things that had, in his phrase, averted revolution. The British government safeguarded the supply of fish and potatoes during both world wars, one of the few foods never rationed. Churchill called them good companions. Today about 10,000 shops remain. The saying used to be as cheap as chips, turns out not even Chips are cheap anymore. Prices have risen, but the ritual endures. Eaten from paper with salt and vinegar are often standing up. Even as shops close, fish and chips remain a defining British tradition. With their own day, the first Friday in June every year is National Fish and Chips Day. If you want the full experience, takeaway Eaten from Paper, Salt and Vinegar, Standin' Up, try these London places. Rock and Soul Place, 47 Endell Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 9AJ. Open since 1871, one of London's oldest chippies, known for fresh fish and crisp, non-greasy batter. Fish Central, 149 to 155 Central Street, King Square, Clarkenwell, EC1V 8AP. Family run since 1968, widely considered among the best in London. Fresh cod cooked to order and excellent chips. Multiple food writers have called it the best fish and chips in London. Meanwhile, as fish and chips rose to prominence, the East End developed its own portable food culture, built around one creature that for a time could thrive in the filthy waters of the Thames. Most fish couldn't survive in it. The eel could up to a point. Eventually even Thames pollution caught up with the eel. For a while, however, eels were abundant. They also arrived from Dutch fishing boats into Billensgate Fish Market, which had been operating on the north bank of the Thames since the sixteenth century. The result was that eels were cheap, extraordinarily cheap, and available everywhere. Street sellers walked the docks and markets of East and Southeast London, selling eel pies, jelly deals, and stew deels. The eels were boiled, chopped, and either served hot in a spiced broth, or left cool in their own gelatinous cooking liquid set in naturally into a jelly, eaten cold with malt vinegar and white pepper. No equipment, no plate required. The pie and mash shop. London's eel pie and mash shops grew out of street vendors selling cheap food to working class Londoners. Eels, once abundant in the Thames, or imported, were served hot or jellied alongside minced beef pies, and a parsley liquor. The first shop opened in London in 1844 in South. By the late 19th century they were a staple of city life, distinctive tiled interiors, marble tables, simple menus. At their peak, they anchored working class food culture. In the 20th century, their decline mirrored change in diets and communities, leaving only a few dozen today, mostly in East London. What remains is a uniquely London tradition. Pie and mash and bright green parsley liquor, unusual, but worth trying. Three families dominated the world of pie and mash shops. The Manses, the Cooks, and the Kelly's. M. Manns, at their peak, had over a hundred shops. Today fewer than forty remain.

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Cook dates back to Clarkenwell, 1862.

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Cook's Eel Pie and Mash Shop at Nine Broadway Market, E84PH, is still in operation and its building, Grade 2 listed. Emma Mann's opened in Bermansey in 1892, still operating. And G. Kelly has traded for generations in Bow. The man's business itself grew from a marriage into the Cook family, opening its first shop on Tower Bridge in 1902, and now the oldest surviving example. Mans' Pie Mash Shop at 204 to 204A, Deptford High Street, SE83PR, still in operation, and its building also Grade 2 listed. The sandwich and the eel pie solved the same problem. How to eat something fill-in without a formal meal. Both emerged in London and became class defined in foods. The sandwich, named after an earl, spread globally. The eel pie, created by dock workers and immigrant families, survives in fewer than 14 London shops. One is everywhere, the other is fading where it began. But the eel story, it's not over just yet. It leads, unexpectedly, to a pub. The Eelpie pub in Twickenham is named after Eelpie Island, once a popular Victorian day trip spot where Londoners ate eelpie. By the late 19th century, the island itself took its name from those paddle steamer day trippers and their food. Charles Dickens mentioned the Eelpie Island Hotel in Nicholas Nickleby, but its fame now comes from its music. In 1956, a local trumpeter began running jazz nights in the old ballroom of the Eelpie Island Hotel. An antique stealer named Arthur Chisnell took over and he turned it into a proper club. By the early 1960s, the Island's hotel became a legendary venue for jazz and early rhythm and blues. The Rolling Stones held a residency there in 1963, alongside artists like Eric Clapton, The Who, and Pink Floyd. Rod Stewart was first discovered after Long John Baldry heard him buskin at Twickenham Station and recruited him that same night for a gig on the island. The club was forced to close in 1967 when the building was deemed beyond repair. It briefly reopened in 1969 as a commune of hippies and anarchists, but unfortunately in 1971 it burnt down. Today the name survives, tracing a line from one of London's cheapest foods to one of the birthplaces of British rock. Act 5. The rest of the table. Eels survived on the margins of the city, but they weren't alone. Victorian and Edwardian London depended on a whole ecosystem of cheap street foods sold from barrows, carts, and by children at dawn. What became of them reveals how the city itself changed. The Shellfish Store Cockles, welks, mussels, and shrimps were sold from barrows across working class London from at least the eighteenth century, eaten with vinegar and pepper standing up a staple of the East End. Cockles and mussels have survived by moving up market onto gastro menus. Welks have not. They've quietly disappeared along with the communities that ate them. One of the last shellfish stalls still trades at Roman Road Market in Bow. The Savoloy, a bright red, highly seasoned smoked sausage long associated with London fish and chip shops. Its name comes from the French Savelas, a sausage that historically could include brain, though modern savelois do not. Often compared to a British hot dog, the Savaloy has endured without reinvention, still sitting quietly in chippies unchanged. Peas puddin, a traditional savory mash made from bottled yellow split peas, spices, and often ham stock or bacon. Although now seen as a traditional Northern food, there was a rich pre-war history of peas puddin shops which sat alongside Pia and Mash and Fish and Chip Shops in London. The nursery rhyme, peas puddin' hot, peas pudding cold, peas puddin in the pot, nine days old. It's a documentary record of London street food, a cheap fill-in dish kept warm, reheated, and eaten over days. Once common, it's almost vanished from London, surviving mainly in the Northeast. The rhyme outlasted the food. Up next, faggots. Often need an explanation even to Brits. Fagots are essentially a British meatball. The name refers to how they're bundled like sticks. They consist of offal, liver, heart, lung, mixed with herbs, wrapped in cowl fat, and baked. They emerged from necessity, cheaper cuts for those who couldn't afford better meat. They were once common in street stores and pie shops. They survive today mainly as frozen products, still around but no longer part of everyday street food. One of the last traditional sellers is Ivies, in Poplar's crisp street market run by Lorraine Paul, serving faggots alongside peas pudding and saveloys for over 60 years. The baked potato. Of all Victorian street foods, the baked potato has changed the least. Sold from wheeled ovens since the 1850s, it doubled as both food and hand warmer in winter. Today the ovens are vans, but jacket potatoes are still found around offices and markets largely unchanged. Watercress. Henry Mayhew documented the Watercress girls of Victorian London, children selling bunches for a halfpenny, often as their only income. Supplied by beds in Hampshire and Hertfordshire, watercress with bread was for many a minimal breakfast. Today it's sold at Borough Market for several pounds a bag. And then there's the oyster. This is the story that inverts everything. The Oyster. In Victorian London, oysters were the food of the poor, cheap, abundant, and widely sold from street barrows. Charles Dickens in Pickwick Papers has this to say. Poverty and oysters always seem to go together. The Thames and the Essex Coast produced them in great volumes. Abundance kept the price low. Overfishing, Thames pollution, and typhoid outbreaks in the early 1900s that were traced to contaminated oysters destroyed supply and demand. Railways bring in alternatives like fish and chips. Oysters disappeared from the working class diet, re-emerging as a luxury. Once poor food, now an expensive delicacy. The sandwich was named for an earl, but eaten by everyone. This shift had little to do with taste and everything to do with supply, public health, and economics. The foods which survived either have a retail home, the sausage roll, in Gregg's, the pork pie at the grocery deli counter, or a specific community kept making it, like the pie and mash shops of the East End. The foods that have not survived had neither. Peas puddin, faggots, the whelk, they're all disappearing. The oyster is the outlier. Surviving by becoming something else entirely. Act six London Street Markets. To understand how London has fed itself, go to Borough Market, just south of London Bridge. It began a thousand years ago at the city's main river crossing, where traders could intercept traffic in and out of London. Records date back to 1014. By the medieval period, it had grown so large it was causing congestion on London Bridge. Parliament shut it down in 1755. Locals revived it a year later at its current site. The present iron glass buildings originate with Henry Rose in 1851, overlaid in the 1860s with the railway viaducts that still run above the market. Legally, the only way market trustees could accommodate the viaducts was through a fly-in leasehold, meaning the viaducts technically float above the market in perpetuity. Every time the railway expands and they need to widen the bridge, the market trustees receive compensation. One of the more unusual property arrangements in London. By the late 20th century, Borough was a fade in wholesale market. Its revival came in 1998 with a food fair led by Henrietta Green. It transformed the market into a hub for artisan producers. Today it's one of the world's most visited food markets, attracting around 20 million people a year, and parts of the market have grade two listed status. The ginger pig. Tim Wilson, a Yorkshire farmer, raised in rare breed pigs, joined Borough Market's 1990s revival, starting with a butcher's block by day, sleeping in his van at night. That venture became the ginger pig, now one of Britain's most respected butchers, sourcing high-quality rare breed meat and focusing on traditional methods. They're best known for their exceptional sausage rolls, baked fresh every morning in their Bermansey kitchen, all butter, puffed pastry, generous pork filling, and famously large variations like pork and stilton sit alongside classics, plus pork pies and scotch eggs, all popular enough to guarantee a cue. Broadway Market, London Fields, Hackney, E8, 4 ph. For many, London's best all-round neighborhood market. Located in a conservation area with several listed buildings. Expect sourdough, fresh pasta, sausages, tapas, Thai street food, and Ethiopian injera. At the end is London Fields and its Lido, market, park, and open air swimming in one perfect summer ritual. Brixton Village and Market Row, Cold Harbor Lane, SW9, 8PS. Covered arcades in grade two listed interwar buildings and among London's most distinctive food spots. Afro-Caribbean staples, goat curry, jerk chicken, saltfish, plantain sit alongside a wide mix of independent restaurants. It's dense, lively, well worth the trip. Camden Market, Chalk Farm Road, NW18AA. Surely one of London's most energetic, alternative market areas set around the canals of Camden Town. It's less a single market than a cluster of adjoining ones, parts of which are grade two star listed. Food is the main draw: Korean fried chicken, Japanese bow, Thai noodles, Venezuelan arepas, and Colombian grilled meats, loaded fries, curries, vegan comfort food, and global desserts. Beyond that, expect vintage clothing, handmade jewelry, alternative fashion, art and quirky gifts. Greenwich Market 5B, Greenwich Market SE109HZ. Located in a covered market hall in the heart of the West Greenwich Conservation Area and Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, near the Thames and Royal Observatory, smaller and calmer than Camden or Borough with a relaxed village feel. Founded by Royal Charter in 1700, opened in 1737 near the old Royal Naval College. It was once a traditional produce and meat market with on-site slaughterhouses. It moved to its current site in the early 19th century. Today it does lean towards arts and crafts, handmade jewelry, artwork, antiques, and independent designers, but the food presence remains strong. Ethiopian, Indian, Korean, and Middle Eastern stalls, plus crepes, sushi, cakes, pies, a carvery with roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, and really good coffee. Maltby Street Market, Arch 46, Ropewalk, Maltby Street, Bermansey SE1, 3PA. This is the insider's choice. About a 15-minute walk from Borough Market and located beneath a railway viaduct. It's narrow and untouristy, with microbreweries tucked between self-storage units, and it's packed with standout stalls. Scottish salmon on dark bread, Venezuelan Arapas, Vietnamese ban mi, Spanish Hamon carved off the hawk, Scotch eggs of every variety, grilled steak wraps, guyosa, Sicilian lemonade, and great cheese toasties from the cheese truck. Come hungry. Old Spittlefield's Market, 16 Horner Square, E16EW, a covered Victorian hall from 1885, now also Grade 2 listed. Once a wholesale produce market, it's now home to independent traders. The food is global, South American, Japanese, Ethiopian, Lebanese, and better than its touristy set in suggests. Last up, Portobello Road Market, Notting Hill, W111LJ, London's most famous street market, antiques and clothing at the Notting Hill end, Moroccan and Portuguese food on the north end, up towards Goldburn Road. Don't miss the Dutch pancakes, salt cod fritters, and excellent coffee. Well that's all folks, but now I'm sure you're hungry. Go make a sandwich and then plan your next London trip, forearmed with the knowledge of London's best street foods. Up next in episode 10, we're touring Charlie Chaplin's London. Until then, share this episode with someone you think would like to hear it!