Growing up in southwest London in the 2000s and 2010s, I heard a lot about Gail’s. The area was an early bastion of the posh café-slash-bakery chain: my mum would oftengo to the branch in Barnes, an idyllic village that clings to a bend in the Thames below Hammersmith, and bump into the parents of other kids at my and my sisters’ schools. It was a place to see and be seen as you bought expensive lattes – the flat white hadn’t arrived yet – and loaves of a new type of bread they called “sourdough”.
Since then, Gail’s domain has expanded, the tally of its branches puffing up like bread in an oven. The first Gail’s opened in Hampstead in 2005; now there are 131 of them across the country, with 35 more planned to open this year alone. Since the US private equity firm Bain Capital bought a controlling stake in Gail’s in 2021, the chain’s growth has been on a steep upward tilt.
One of those 35 additions is proving to be trouble. An online petition to stop a branch of Gail’s opening on Orford Road, in the centre of northeast London’s Walthamstow Village, has now received more than 1,500 signatures. An element of this opposition is explicitly political: Luke Johnson, the chain’s former owner and current chairman, is a Brexit backer and lockdown sceptic who seems happy to get stuck in to culture wars. On X, he’s retweeted op-eds from Spiked and the Telegraph bashing the Walthamstow wokerati. (Johnson, if you’re reading this: hello! Whatever our political differences, I compliment you on Gail’s delicious pistachio, lemon and rose cake.)
But more important is a general anti-gentrification feeling. The petition doesn’t mention politics; instead it cites how the proposed Gail’s brings with it “a risk of overshadowing our much-loved local stores due to [the chain’s] massive scale and advertising reach. This could lead to decreased visibility and pedestrian traffic towards independently run businesses, threatening their very existence and dismantling the character and diversity crucial to Walthamstow’s charm.”
Walthamstow, in truth, has been partly gentrified already. House prices there have risen 23% since the pandemic, as creative types are pushed out of Stoke Newington and Dalston by bankers and tech bros. Walthamstow Village is already a lovely place when you can buy coffee and bread for a Gail’s-esque price – it’s just that residents want the fuzzy feeling of being ripped off by an independent business instead. The petition is a symptom of an area moving through successive waves of gentrification: as it becomes wealthier, upmarket chains start to open.
The local area is not just fighting off Gail’s, therefore, but the sub-class of London that is the chain’s patron and champion. And that takes us back to Barnes. It’s full of wealthy people, but they’re of a different character to those who live in Chelsea and even Fulham a few kilometres east. Many of them have come from elsewhere in the country – elsewhere in Europe, often – and have bought houses in Barnes with money they made themselves rather than inherited. They’re not as posh as the neighbouring Henrys and Henriettas – they’re more likely to be managing their assets than going to their dinner parties – and they’re a bit more socially liberal too, partly because they’ve directly benefitted from social mobility. They probably go on nice holidays, but they probably don’t have a “family place” in the country or by the coast for weekends. They are the epitome of the London dream: go into the City, put the hours in, then claim your blessed, semi-detached plot of zone 3.
As well as not being as established as the Tory financial elite in west London and the Home Counties, Barnes man and woman also don’t have the status of the Labour cultural elite in north and east London, which dominates arts, media and academia. If a scion of Barnes wants to go into those industries, they can expect financial support, but not introductions to the right people. Squeezed uncomfortably between Britain’s two elite tribes, what does Barnes do? It votes Lib Dem, along with the rest of southwest London.
And the Lib Dems go with Gail’s like coffee goes with croissants. Ed Davey’s party did handsomely in the election via “Operation Cinnamon Bun”, in which it targeted seats in southern England that had their own branches of Gail’s. This is a prosperous, discerning world – but not so prosperous or discerning as to be sniffy about upmarket chain cafes, as Tory and Labour elites might be in different ways. By resisting the imposition of such basic baubles of affluence as Gail’s, artsy Walthamstow residents are resisting encroachment by London’s younger corporate class, which is now rampaging around the city’s east in much the same manner as its parents once bought up the west.
Just as Bain-owned Gail’s spirits its profits over the Atlantic – as with so much of Britain’s economy – Barnes man and woman usually work for international, US-based corporations. They get very well compensated for their labour, but they’re not business owners, and their wages get blown quickly in such an expensive city. Like Gail’s itself, they are the agents of the new, distinctly un-sovereign UK economy. Its masters are no longer found on any grouse moor, but sat in front of a Bloomberg terminal in some converted cottage on Long Island. And for every loaf and every cortado that runs through the Gail’s till, their grip gets a little tighter, and their native footsoldiers spread a little further through London.
[See also: The Tories should expose Nigel Farage for who he is]
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