Читать книгу: «Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain»

TITLE PAGE

INTRODUCTION

1. FOOD

2. FAMILY

3. PROPERTY

4. HOME

5. CLOTHES

6. EDUCATION

7. HOLIDAYS

8. LEISURE

9. WORK

CONCLUSION

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

‘We are all middle class now,’ said John Prescott to howls of derision in 1997, in the run-up to the general election that swept Tony Blair into power.

Prescott was, of course, Blair’s bruising, working-class sidekick who had gone to sea at the age of 16 and worked his way up the ranks of P&O. With his pugnacious beliefs and mangled English, he was wheeled out to persuade old Labour voters that Blair, the first prime minister since Sir Alec Douglas-Home to attend a public school, understood their concerns. The idea that Prescott was middle class seemed as likely as finding caviar in Lidl.

But 15 years on, his astute comment has been proved correct, with the great majority of us considering ourselves middle class. Meanwhile he’s sitting in the House of Lords, the ultimate sanctuary of the ruling elite of Britain, and Lidl sells John West lumpfish caviar. Yours for £2.48 for a 50g tin.

The election was held on 1 May 1997. It was, I remember, a very warm day, and in glorious sunshine I cast my ballot for regime change, as nearly all students that day did. It was the summer of my finals at Oxford, and for a generation who had only ever known Margaret Thatcher and John Major things really could only get better, as D:Ream sang. My vote was not really political; it was generational.

That evening I went down to London to attend the dinner to celebrate my cousin’s 21st birthday. It was being held at White’s, the smartest of all London’s gentlemen’s clubs, a glorious early Georgian building on St James’s, which had once served as the unofficial headquarters of the Tory party and where the Prince of Wales had his stag night. The dress code, as it is always at gentlemen’s clubs, come rain or stifling heat, was jacket and tie. I turned up in a three-piece tweed suit. Nowadays I would call it vintage. Then, it was charity shop chic, bought in a second-hand outlet in Oxford for a student Chekhov play. It was, in reality, a 1950s garment, but accessorised correctly I was sort of passable as a turn-of-the-century Russian doctor hanging out near a cherry orchard. I thought I looked pretty stylish.

My father thought otherwise. Possibly the mildest mannered man you could imagine, he exploded with ill-concealed contempt, ending with the immortal lines uttered without any hint of irony: ‘Gentlemen do not wear tweed after six o’clock in London.’

Behind this temper was, I knew, a deep-seated disappointment that I had let him down. My entire upbringing had been an extended lesson in the British class system, and its tiny invisible rules, a living out of Nancy Mitford’s list of ‘U and non-U’ words to ensure my vocabulary did not embarrass any of the guests for tea. Debrett’s was occasionally brought down from the shelf to teach me how to address envelopes correctly to the assorted earls, countesses and viscounts from whom I had received Christmas presents. Mostly these were aunts and cousins. How to curtsy to royalty, eat asparagus and artichokes, pluck a pheasant, tip a gamekeeper, when to leave the room, what one wore – this was not some parlour game, this was just how I was brought up in west London in the 1970s and 80s. These rules were never drilled into me, they were merely taught alongside tying one’s shoelaces, riding a bicycle and asking to get down from the table. It seemed, as it always does for any child, normality itself. Whether one wore tweed after six, brown in town, if one called it ‘pudding’ or ‘dessert’ were things I was just meant to know. If I wanted to look like a tramp in my student flat, fine, but please God, not in White’s.

I had got it wrong and my father believed I had done so on purpose as some sort of silent political protest – though it was clearly laughable to suggest that wearing tweed in the grandest of all St James’s clubs was an act of solidarity with John Prescott.

I spent the entire evening fuming, as the grandees around me fumed too about how the incoming government was going to ruin Britain. The votes had yet to be counted, but the landslide was already inevitable. Change was in the air, but not in this privileged corner of SW1. Surely, I argued, in the summer of 1997 such niceties of class and of what gentlemen did or did not do were not just a decade out of joint, but a full century? Apparently not.

And 15 years later the niceties are still very much alive – just in a different form. Class has never gone away. Even after the years of never having it so good, the white heat of technology, the no turning back, 13 years of New Labour and, now, of being all in it together. If anything, it is more prevalent than it has ever been and it touches nearly everyone, including millions who consider class an irrelevant anachronism. John Major promised a classless society by the end of the 1990s, Tony Blair said that the old establishment was being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class, Gordon Brown vowed to create a generation that would build a Britain where the ‘talent you had mattered more than the title you held’. But for all the pronouncements from various different governments, the country is obsessed as much as ever about class. When the chief whip Andrew Mitchell reportedly hurled abuse at a Downing Street policeman, he was mostly criticised not for his appalling manners, but for his alleged use of the word ‘pleb’, confirming in the eyes of the critics of the Government such as Polly Toynbee that ‘the social class of Cameron’s crew … rule for their own ruling class’.¹

A whole host of activities and institutions are attacked for being ‘too middle class’ – the Church of England, English Heritage, Girl Guides, tennis, BBC sitcoms, the Labour party. Various broadcasters, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Royal Opera House and the entire cabinet are derided for being ‘too posh’; rows over the education system are almost entirely centred around how to ensure more working-class children get better grades and places at university; hands are wrung about how nearly every Bafta winner and top-40 musician went to private school, and why a disproportionate number of white working-class boys end up out of work, out of a job, out of luck.

It’s not just the press which casts so much of what they write about in the molten, malleable language of class – ‘Are your neighbours middle-class cocaine addicts like me?’² is a recent headline in the Daily Mail. Policy makers too increasingly see class as the cause of so many of Britain’s economic and social woes. The Office for National Statistics, and a dazzling array of think-tanks and research houses, publish almost weekly data to show that social inequality continues to widen in Britain – your health, your wealth, your happiness are all related to the social class you belong to. An astonishing amount of time and money is spent measuring and defining the socio-economic groups that make up modern Britain: C1, D, Class 1, managerial, semi-routine sales occupation, intermediate clerical. These groups are meant to be as objective and statistically robust as possible. And all serve to help the Government and its agencies attempt to improve ‘social mobility’ – the ultimate goal of so many in charge.

But the dry statistics relating to the upper deciles, the long-term economically inactive, the ‘discouraged’ and higher managerial classifications are not a true reflection of class in Britain today. Class has never been simply about whether you were rich or poor, whether you were the boss or the worker, or if you paid for your education or not. It was more than that. Class was always a subjective, loaded term, one that implied judgement. It used to be about a thousand little rules designed to trip up those not in the inner circle – what time you ate your evening meal, phoning for the fish knives, how you pronounced Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, which day to wear an old school tie. Much of it was knowledge, wrapped up in a secret language and accent, and was a way that social superiors knew to assert their superiority. It was tricky (though not impossible) to fake, and it was designed, so it seemed to those not in the inner circle, to keep outsiders in their place. When Brian Winterflood started a job at the London Stock Exchange in 1951 he wore brown shoes to work, only to be greeted on his first day with shouts, running around the exchange, of ‘Brown boots, brown boots!’ He quickly scuttled off to find a pair of black shoes. ‘And I’ve always worn black ever since.’ Hardly anyone remembers these rules now. Brown shoes are a common sight in the City, while accents have become blurred, with the public school drawl edging ever closer to the Essex twang. Even Prince Harry’s speech is peppered with glottal stops.

Class has changed, as Britain has changed, and its populace has been faced with an ever wider array of choices. Class used to be about your position in life; now it appears to be increasingly about lifestyle. This is a term that only took hold in the 1950s when there started to be enough money around to furnish a lifestyle with more than a scuttle of coal and a week’s holiday in a boarding house at Blackpool. And it took off in the 1960s with the glossy Sunday newspaper magazines that chronicled the swinging consumerism of the era.

This book is an attempt to map some of those changes and to find out what class means in Britain today. It is about the habits and lifestyles of millions of households and families who grew up on salad cream and ended up using balsamic glaze from Morrisons on their monkfish fillets. Of how holidays hop picking in Kent turned into flights to Disney World and cruises around the Canaries, and how tables bought on tick from the Co-op became adorned with Jo Malone smelly candles and an orchid from M&S.

This makes no claim to being a history book, but it does have a nominal starting point: 1954, a year of British triumph, when the first sub-four-minute mile was run, the year after Everest had been conquered and the structure of DNA established, the early years of the new Elizabethan era when it seemed after two decades of deprivation and war that anything was possible. Importantly, for millions of households, 1954 was the year when meat rationing was lifted, the last of the restrictions to be scrapped and an end to 14 years of continually having to check your pocket book before you calculated what you could buy. Families finally had the freedom to spend their weekly pay packet as they saw fit. It kick-started six decades of conspicuous consumption, which have culminated in people scanning their iPhones for Wagamama discount vouchers and supermarket delivery vans ferrying jars of anchovies and espresso pods at ten o’clock at night around the streets of Britain. An era which now looks under threat from the dramatic and almost unprecedented collapse in disposable income for many families – a phenomenon that did not happen in such a sustained way during the recessions of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

It has been six decades of radical change. 1954 also saw the first purpose-built comprehensive school, an attempt to give equal opportunities to the children of Britain, regardless of where or to whom they were born; the release of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’, the first cultural event to give a voice to teenagers; the very first Wimpy bar, bringing the concept of ‘jet-age eating’ to the masses; and the first package holidays to Benidorm, giving ordinary workers a taste of the sun-kissed beaches that only their betters had enjoyed a generation before.

During this second Elizabethan era there have been plenty of seismic changes and many things that have not really moved on at all. Class manages to straddle both camps. In the last 60 years there has been the almost complete destruction of the upper classes, the substantial dismantling of the working classes and the enormous, remorseless rise of the middle classes.

The landed aristocracy who owned Britain and ruled Britain have, save for a few notable exceptions, been forced to either sell off or open up their family homes to the public and vacate their comfortable benches in the House of Lords. Meanwhile, millions of manual workers who were paid decently for a hard day’s work have ended up jobless or in call centres, while the unions and working men’s clubs, organisations that gave so many working communities their backbone, appear to be in terminal decline.

The population of Britain has not got smaller; far from it. Those at the top and the bottom have not disappeared – they have merely moved class. Millions have left the ranks of the working classes and joined the ranks of the middle classes, while hundreds of thousands of those at the top have taken a step down. In the mid-1950s various surveys suggested that about a quarter of the population considered themselves ‘middle class’; that figure now is consistently 70 per cent. The rest say they are working class. No one openly admits to being upper class.

But even if seven in ten people are middle class, that does not mean they all share the same lifestyle. There has certainly been some blurring of once strict boundaries of taste and consumption patterns. The majority of people own their own homes, and some of those a place in the sun too. Even more own a car. Prime ministers wear trainers, royal princesses pop into Topshop to buy skirts, sushi is so commonplace that commuters can pick it up with their pint of milk at the station, and Iceland can sell you frozen chicken Kievs. Sky satellite dishes, formerly a sign of ‘council house culture’, are now found on the side of Belgravia maisonettes. What was once recherché is now quotidian, products and decorations that used to be strictly for the working class are now symbols of distinction. Politicians rush to Greggs to scoff sausage rolls and pasties in an attempt to prove how ‘in touch’ they are with ‘ordinary’ voters, while chipped and rough kitchen utensils that their grandparents would have been thrilled to have thrown out are now snapped up by their wealthier descendants as ‘vintage’.

Despite the severe recession, most of us enjoy a lifestyle of what seems – in comparison with 1954 – unbridled luxury: flights to Thailand, 47-inch televisions, food blenders, bread makers, steak on sale at the local supermarket (open till 10 o’clock at night), fashions that can be replenished every season, olives served alongside chilled chardonnay at your local pub. We are, in consumption terms, nearly all middle class. The white-goods revolution that started under Harold Macmillan, along with the white heat one under another Harold, not only put gadgets into consumers’ hands, it freed millions of women from the drudgery of housework, allowing them to join the ranks of the salariat. Washing machines, freezers and microwaves replaced domestic servants, and in so doing played their part both in creating two-income households and, in turn, a society with enough disposable income for status-defining trips to Itsu and days out at Blenheim Palace, where they can buy the ‘Below Stairs’ range of House Maid’s scrubbing brushes and Butler’s champagne openers.

Even as early as 1960 David Marquand, the academic and future Labour MP, declared that – superficially at least – ‘the class war appears to be over, its warriors drowned in a sea of consumer durables. The working class itself is rapidly adopting middle-class standards, middle-class values and a middle-class style of life. Marks and Spencer dress every shopgirl like a débutante, hire purchase equips working-class kitchens with gadgets which would once have made the middle classes gasp with envy; night after night telly erodes what cultural barriers still remain to divide one class from another. These changes may disconcert the intellectual and appal the nostalgic, but the onward rush of modern industry continues undismayed, slowly transforming the most class-conscious country in the world into “one nation”.’³

But 50 years on, new gulfs have opened up within that ‘one nation’ of shoppers. Do you buy your meat wrapped in waxed paper from a farmers’ market, from Tesco or from Asda? Is your holiday a trip to Butlins in Bognor or via Ryanair to Rimini? Is your electrical gadget a Roberts Radio from John Lewis or a James Martin spice grinder from Argos? These may seem trivialities that can only concern a society corrupted by consumerism. But they matter to an awful lot of people – even if they don’t realise it. One of the women I interviewed for this book, Hayleigh, a mother of three who was brought up in a council house, is accused by her grandmother of ‘shooting above her station’ because she owns a Sainsbury’s hessian bag-for-life. ‘She says I’ve forgotten where I came from.’ Hayleigh uses that same bag-for-life if she should ever pop to Iceland to buy her food – too embarrassed to be seen carrying Iceland plastic carrier bags.

Snobbism was never confined to ducal palaces, and certainly didn’t die out when the Queen stopped débutantes (‘debs’) being presented at court in 1958. It is a powerful social force and has a major influence on how we spend our money. This, particularly in an era when there is less cash about, is now more important, when it comes to deciding status, than how we earn that money, I argue. If everyone around you professes to be of the same class, or even classless, then the battle to assert one’s position comes down to what you consume rather than what you produce. It is about the little things – where you buy your jeans, the thickness of froth on your coffee, the thinness of your bresaola. The food, the clothes, the holidays, the homes, the culture, the furnishings we choose to spend our money on – even the plastic sacks we choose to carry those purchases around in.

This book tries to decipher all these products and work out what they say about us. Spending is more than just a frivolous matter of bags and burgers. It is, for some, a cause of great social anxiety as well as financial hardship and starts when they are in the womb – whether they were born in a private hospital or not, and whether their parents paid for a classified to announce their birth in the pages of a broadsheet newspaper or bought a Burberry sleepsuit and a Juicy Couture buggy to welcome them into the world.

I am aware that a book on class, which ignores the old pillars of social status – family, education, work – is one that only tells half the story, so I have attempted to tackle these topics as well, though even here, I argue, consumption plays a significant part in determining status. There are not many children that made it to Oxford whose parents never spent a penny on a tutor, music class or educational trip out.

It is all these consumer decisions that help separate the ‘middle classes’ that somehow include the Duchess of Cambridge – in her Le Chameau green wellies, Zara tops and Boden skirts – from the ‘middle classes’ that include Asda Mums, living off tinned food just before pay day. With a dazzlingly varied array of shops, brands and products available to furnish our lifestyles, there are many different types of middle class. This book attempts to categorise these different middle classes along patterns of consumption and explain why some brands remain exclusive and desired and others succumb to ‘prole drift’, why Iceland is despised by so many while Aldi is worshipped, why holidaying in Norfolk in a tent is so much more high class than in a hotel in Florida. For ease of reference I have given all these groups labels, many of them a bit flippant. Despite the stereotypes, we are not as a nation easily split into discrete groups, and I realise many of the labels are far from perfect.

There are the Portland Privateers, high earners and high spenders, who stamp their status (often newly won) onto their children before they have even been born by booking into the private maternity unit, preferably the Portland Hospital in London. They are some of the key supporters of a number of successful high-end, high-visibility brands that have flourished even in the economic downturn: Mulberry, Belstaff, Smythson. To the untrained eye they may appear similar to the Rockabillies. This lot is a broad church of consumers, but they have very much a rural attitude to life, even if they live in Fulham rather than Fairford. They are often wealthy individuals, sometimes not at all, whose defining feature is holidaying at home, ideally at the resort of Rock in Cornwall, where they can mingle with fellow Prosecco-sipping holidaymakers in their Jack Wills hoodies and Boden swimming trunks, red trousers, whipping up a Jamie Oliver recipe on the barbecue.

Similar in attitude to the Portland Privateers, but a million miles away from them in terms of income, are the Hyphen-Leighs – acutely aware of the power of brands and labels and keen to assert their status through spending. Their ability to latch onto the latest fashions and make them their own stretches even to the naming of their children – invariably double barrelled and unusually spelt. Paul’s Boutique and Sports Direct are their natural high street habitats, places where smart casual takes on a whole new meaning.

Sun Skittlers couldn’t really give two hoots about whether their polo shirt has a penguin in a top hat, a crocodile, a polo player or a hippo in a bath on the front. Money is spent on leisure, not fashion – from a 40p copy of the Sun to a game of skittles down at their local working men’s club. None of them defines themselves as middle class, but they are fully paid up members of the modern consumer class who despite fairly low incomes are usually home owners, sun seekers and season ticket holders.

The Middleton classes, named in honour of Carole, rather than Catherine, started off life in almost an identical situation to the Sun Skittlers, but have spent many of their waking hours escaping from their red-top, blue-collar, hire-purchase background. They too embraced all the opportunities that consumer Britain threw at them but they wanted more; and trips to Torremolinos were upgraded to Tuscany, the Daily Herald was swapped for the Daily Mail, the Co-op meat counter for M&S ready meals. This does not make them traitors to their roots; they are the golden generation that helped drive post-war Britain out of austerity and are proud to declare themselves ‘middle class’.

Asda Mums, mostly on low incomes, shy away from defining themselves as middle class. But their subtle understanding of status and brands, their insistence that their babies are given organic Ella’s Kitchen mango pouches (while the older one gets a McDonald’s as a treat), their championing of Pampers and Thorpe Park, prove that so much of modern consumption is driven by parents buying for their children. No more so than with this group.

Then there are the Wood Burning Stovers, the descendants of the original Habitat-shopping generation. A well-turned garlic press and a wood-burning stove, rather than an electric whisk and a large TV, is what gives them pleasure – you can spot them with their Daunt book bags tripping their way to pick up a box of yellow courgettes from their farmers’ market in their Birkenstock sandals, trying not to look too smug.

These groups are introduced throughout the book, and will I hope shed a little light on the country we are. Of course many people straddle more than one group and throughout their life have travelled through different classes. I am already on about my third class, having strived to squash my pheasant-plucking background ever since I was at school. I now fall mostly within the Wood Burning Stover category, which is not something I feel particularly comfortable with. No one likes to be pigeon-holed; we all understandably believe that our consumption patterns are unique. But, as the book explains, the consumer companies that supply us with our food, drink, leisure and clothes spend a considerable amount of time categorising us. We might as well try to beat them at their own game.

There are a small number of consumers who claim, with some legitimacy, to be entirely outside the consumer society – to never shop at a supermarket, to never fly abroad and to take great pleasure in shredding the Argos catalogue onto their compost heap. But these too are defined just as much by their opposition to the branded, consumer world as those who shop at JD Sports. And you’ll find a fair few of them happily scouring the John Lewis kitchen department or their local car boot fair and picking up a cut-price smoked salmon at Aldi.

Crucially, I hope to explain why this ability to define ourselves through what we buy or don’t buy is partly out of our control. Many of our choices have already been ‘edited’ by the shop, the restaurant, the food manufacturer, the holiday company. Sir Terence Conran – one of the towering figures in the rise of the consumer classes – was always very firm in refuting the idea that he ‘instructed’ people how to live their lives, that his restaurants and shops somehow imposed on us a manual for middle-class living. But though he was never as crass as to tell people that the only route to happiness was sipping an espresso or snuggling under a duvet, his ‘philosophy’ was choice editing. ‘I want to show people things they may not have seen before. After all, people can only buy what they are offered and what I want to do is offer them things in as honest and genuine way as I can manage; offer things that people may not have known they might want.’⁴

Over the last two generations one of the triumphs of capitalism has been consumer companies’ ability to anticipate what their customers wanted, or thought they wanted, and provide it for them. They have done this through relentless analysis of their customers, where they live, what they buy, when they shop. Supermarkets have been at the forefront of this trend, but others have learnt to be just as adept and spend millions of pounds every year to refine their marketing, their choice of stock and where they site shops. Often what you put into your basket or which outlet you visit is determined not by you, but by the company, many of whom have worked out exactly who they want through their doors. And who they don’t.

I too have tried to mine the data and find out more about these different middle classes – and indeed about those that are still outside the 70 per cent. From toffs to chavs, from posh wankers to gyppos. The class system still throws up terms of abuse with a vitriol that would be unacceptable when describing race, sex or age. Working class is only occasionally heard as a straight description; it is usually as a nostalgic badge of honour worn by those who have made it to the House of Lords. Instead we have the underclass, the benefits spongers, the feckless, the scroungers. What’s left of the upper classes, too, come in for an equally rough ride. Posh, public-school toffs are to be laughed at, in their ‘Look at my fucking red trousers’ and appearances in the pages of Tatler. The middle classes, in becoming ever wider, have pushed those outside of its ranks to the margin, so far away from normal life as to be comic-book creations fit only for ‘scripted reality’ shows.

Although this book is mostly concerned with products, shops and brands, it is really about people, all of them in some way members of the modern British consumer classes. Class does not reside in products, it only takes shape in ownership of those things or rejection of them. I hope their stories, and my story too, will explain a little bit about where we have ended up in Britain today.

CHAPTER 1
FOOD

How did something as innocent as a lunchtime sandwich or morning coffee become the cause of social anxiety? Here we meet the Asda Mums.

The ready meal was nothing new in 1979. TV dinners were in existence before the advent of colour television, and Fray Bentos pies had long been available to consumers unwilling or unable to take the time to cook their own evening meal.

But in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher swept to power promising to bring harmony to the discordant classes, the ready meal went upmarket, thanks to Cathy Chapman, then 24-year-old head of poultry development at Marks & Spencer. She had already enjoyed success thanks to the simple, though radical for the time, idea of removing first the skin from a chicken breast, and then the bone from a thigh. The following year the breast became coated in Japanese breadcrumbs – crunchier, denser breadcrumbs than a home cook could ever produce from a stale piece of sliced white. Her next product, however, took it to another level.

It was the chicken Kiev. Now, for some, an object of derision, as naff as a tie-dye shirt or snowball cocktail, then, a sophisticated bistro dish that had been appearing on the menus of London restaurants for a few years. It was the first ‘middle-class’ ready meal and helped pave the way for the produce we see on our supermarket shelves today: everything from cheese and ham chicken Kievs from Iceland (£1 for 2) to Charlie Bigham’s Moroccan chicken tagine from Waitrose (£5.99). The ready meal industry is now worth £1.22 billion every year and is at the front line of a never-ending class war over food. Mealtimes have always been fraught, but over the last generation as our diets have become ever more varied, exotic and full of choices, the opportunities to feel bad about what you have put on your plate have been been greater than ever.

Back in 1979, when most people probably thought a Moroccan tagine was something you either smoked or sat on, high-quality cuisine meant French cuisine. Chapman lived in Islington, north London, just 400 yards from Robert Carrier, a restaurant in Camden Passage named after its owner, by then a television star, best-selling cookery writer, innovator of the wipe-clean recipe cards, and proud owner of two Michelin stars. In 1975 the restaurant had hosted dinner for the Queen Mother and Lord Grimthorpe, the first time Her Majesty had dined out in a public restaurant since before her marriage in 1923.¹ Chapman was encouraged by her bosses at M&S to eat at the best restaurants, and it was at Carrier that she first tried chicken Kiev.

‘Yes, I liked it. What’s not to like? Butter, garlic and a crisp outside,’ she recalls. Her taste of crispy, buttery heaven coincided with the rise of an entrepreneur called John Docker, ‘who believed this kind of food – chicken Kiev, prawn cocktail, duck à l’orange – could and should be available to a wider audience,’ explains Chapman. He set up a factory and staffed it with professional chefs who would then sell their pre-prepared meals for restaurants to re-heat. But he had ambitions for families at home also to enjoy this sophistication. And when he showed the dish to M&S, Chapman and her team decided Britain was ready for the first-ever chilled ready meal.

This is what made it different. It was not a boil-in-the-bag meal that you bought from the freezer cabinet, or a dismal pie in a tin. This was a dish presented in an aluminium tray, in the chiller cabinet of a supermarket, still a relatively small area dedicated to dairy products. It was protected by a cardboard box, with a glossy photograph on the front, and sold for £1.99 – the equivalent of about £8 in today’s money, a premium price for a premium product. They even, in the early days, came with a little paper chef’s hat on the sprig bone that protruded from the meat to make it look worthy of a magazine photo shoot. ‘It was really upmarket, fresh prepared food, the first time we’d done restaurant quality meals. It was a very big launch.’ This was food for the middle classes, and the upper middle classes at that.

Like all big launches for M&S it had to be approved by the board of directors. At this point the Kiev was nearly torpedoed. ‘My boss at the time, the head of food, said when he tasted it, “It’s got garlic in. I don’t like garlic, people don’t like garlic” – and said it shouldn’t be put on the shelves.’ This was not an uncommon view at the time. But with six weeks to go before launch it was too late to back out. With all the boxes printed, Chapman was forced to persuade the director he was wrong, and a Kiev without garlic was pointless.

She was right. It was an immediate hit. The dish was the height of sophistication, with its very name evoking exotic, Cold War Russia (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of television’s hits of 1979), while the oozing, melting, garlicky butter hinted at a continental elegance that most people in winter-of-discontent Britain could only dream of. The first weekend, £10,000-worth was sold, and they ran out; production was immediately doubled. Within four weeks this one dish was bringing £50,000 a week into the M&S tills. ‘The sales were phenomenal and it became a talking point at the time. People would have dinner parties and serve it, saying, “Here’s one I made earlier,” and it wasn’t; it was one they’d bought at the end of the road.’ To this day, Marks & Spencer, despite its food sales being one-tenth the size of Tesco, sells more chilled ready meals than any other retailer in Britain² and its dine-in-for-£10 meal deal during the recent recession was the salvation for many Portland Privateers and Middleton class people who had been forced to cut back on eating out at their local restaurant.

M&S’s timing was impeccable and Chapman’s persistence was prescient. Ever since Tetley introduced the tea bag in 1953, convenience food had been growing more sophisticated, but it had never really won over either gourmets or the upper middle classes, the customers that had helped M&S become Britain’s biggest clothing retailer. There was always a fear that processed food was either a bit gimmicky, or frankly just a little common, especially when it was frozen or dehydrated. Fresh ready meals that could be passed off as restaurant-quality dishes you had magically whipped up in your kitchen were a salvation for a generation of women, who were now out during the day working, and didn’t have the time to slave over a stove as their mothers had done.

But though the Kiev was a hit, and helped encourage all the other supermarkets to launch chilled ready meals – in turn fuelling their amazing success at grabbing more of consumers’ disposable income – it exposed class divides when it came to eating, divides that are now deeper than ever before. Greggs versus Pret à Manger, McDonald’s versus Wagamama, frozen chicken dippers versus sous-vide smoked duck. Something as innocent as a slice of white bread may have had the salt content reduced, but it has never been so loaded with social anxieties. It used to be about whether you asked Norman to phone for the fish knives, and whether you called it tea, supper or dinner (or even ‘country supper’ if you are in the Chipping Norton set). Those old-fashioned distinctions about terminology and cutlery still exist to some extent, but the deeper divides are about what you put in your mouth and sip from your morning cup.

Some people not only turn down but actively despise certain meals because they are ‘for chavs and idiots’ and refuse to step inside particular food shops. Food writers are both worshipped – Delia, Jamie, Nigella all so famous they go by first names only – but also reviled for promoting an unobtainable, Wood Burning Stover lifestyle, where the windowsill always has fresh basil, the sausages are always organic and the olive oil is always Fair Trade, and preferably Palestinian too.

Indeed, one’s supermarket of choice has now become almost a short-hand for what socio-economic group you belong to – are you an Asda Mum or Tescopoly drone? A Waitrose deli-counter devotee, an Aldi acolyte or a member of the Farmfoods underclass? Which one are you?

It was all so different back in 1954, when food rationing finally ended with the lifting of meat restrictions. Ration books were burnt in celebration and Smithfield market opened at midnight for the first time since before the war. It had been a slow process allowing Britons unfettered access to food. Indeed, food rationing had been in place for nearly half of the period between 1954 and the end of the First World War.

In an age when sushi is so ubiquitous that Marks & Spencer sells enough seaweed to wrap around the M25 every year³ it is hard to imagine quite how dismal the diet of most families was. As the 1950s were about to start, the weekly ration for a man was 13 ounces of meat, 8 ounces of sugar, 6 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 pints of milk, 1.5 ounces of cheese, 1 ounce of cooking fat and 1 egg.⁴ It was just not possible to have a food revolution on those provisions. Or even a particularly tasty meal. Of course the rich, as always, enjoyed some immunity because they could afford to eat in restaurants, which were free from rationing – though certain limitations were in place, such as meat and fish not being allowed to be served at the same sitting.

Even when eating out, however, the options were limited. Before the war, most food eaten out of the home was consumed, if not in a work canteen, either in a fish and chip shop, a tea room or department store café at one end of the scale, or in an intimidating hotel restaurant at the other end. Outside London, the idea of a reasonably priced, unpretentious restaurant where a working-class family could enjoy a meal was almost unheard of. The most popular option was Lyons corner houses, a chain that had dominated the eating-out market for decades, which made a fortune for its founders, the Jewish immigrant Salmon family (Nigella Lawson is one of the heiresses). Hot meals were served, and some were waitress service, but it was hardly sophisticated fare.

The first (1951) edition of The Good Food Guide, produced by an army of amateur reviewers (a full half-century before TripAdvisor), lays bare quite how uncosmopolitan the British restaurant scene was. Of the 484 restaurants and pubs reviewed outside London, only 11 served primarily foreign food, and of those ten were European, with just one Chinese included.⁵ The idea of the guide came from Raymond Postgate, who had been a founding member of the British Communist party. Though by the 1950s he had put aside Marxism, he took a militant approach to eating out. He believed that diners had a duty to approach their Dover soles or brandy snaps with a certain hostility if they were to ensure they were not to be diddled by the owners of the means of production. ‘On sitting down at the table polish the cutlery and glasses with your napkin. Don’t do this ostentatiously or with an annoyed expression, do it casually. You wish to give the impression not that you are angry with this particular restaurant, but that you are suspicious, after a lifetime of suffering.’ He deserves credit just as much as Elizabeth David, the ground-breaking food writer, for freeing the British from brown meat and browner sauces.

The old hotel dining rooms were crucibles of class. Intimidating, and so often depressing, they were a test for most families eating out. Cutlery, china, wine lists and waiters – all were traps to trip you up and make you feel a fool. My father-in-law can remember clearly the tension in the house as his own father prepared to go off on a trip down from their home town, Workington, to London to represent his union at a dinner. The dinner was to be a formal one at a big West End hotel. So, his father was sat down at the ‘best kitchen’ table (what most working-class people would have called the parlour) and given a tutorial by his wife about the arcane rules of fish knives, soup spoons and which glass to touch first. She had been in service and knew the pitfalls and was determined that he wouldn’t let the side down.

As a family they never ate out, except for when they went on a trip to the department store in Carlisle or Newcastle. ‘Department stores had quite nice restaurants in those days. The prices in Binns [now owned by House of Fraser] were quite reasonable. We’d have fish and chips or a pie, nothing spectacular. Certainly no coffee.

‘But we would never have eaten out in Workington. There was a chap called Walter Archer, who had a bakery and confectionery business, who opened a café in one of his shops, which survived no more than a year or so. He told us that the trouble with the people of Workington is that the moment they’re within five miles of home they don’t see the point of eating out. He was right.’ And if a café or tea room was considered a wasteful luxury, the restaurant at one of the town’s two hotels was out of the question.

The playwright Alan Bennett, a butcher’s son who won a scholarship to Oxford, recalls the horror of his parents visiting him at university and the trip to the hotel. The waiter came with the menu. ‘Mam would say the dread words, “Do you do a poached egg on toast?” and we’d slink from the dining room, the only family in England not to have its dinner at night.’ They were also befuddled by the wine list. But then, as Bennett asks plaintively, ‘What kind of wine goes with spaghetti on toast?’⁶

This partly explains why Britain, more than any other country outside America, was to embrace fast food. It offered the promise of being classless. No waiters, no wine list, no pretentious French terms, no embarrassment about the bill. The first in Britain, opening the year that food rationing ended, was Wimpy. Within a few years it was already starting to change the face of Britain’s high streets and diets, as the Observer reported at the end of the decade: ‘Dirty and lethargic cafés with fly-blown sandwiches and antique sausage rolls have given way to mechanised eating places, though the staff have not always kept pace with jet-age eating.’

Each table came with a wipe-clean menu and the Wimpy signature condiment: a ketchup bottle in the form of a plastic, squeezy tomato; and burgers cost just one shilling and sixpence, the equivalent of a cinema ticket or three loaves of bread – more expensive than it is now in relative terms, but considerably cheaper than a café meal.

The concept, American of course, was brought to Britain by Lyons. In 1958, 5.5 million burgers were sold, enough for one in ten of the population to have eaten a Wimpy that year. What was their success? the newspaper asked. ‘For the customer, particularly the all-important teenager, they are quick, simple and classless. A Wimpy can be eaten in less than ten minutes, leaving the rest of a lunch hour for shop gazing, flirting or jazz.’ Sadly, the nearest today’s office workers get to flirting and jazz at lunchtime is a quick trawl on Facebook.

‘The Wimpy bars, with their bright layout and glass fronts, are inviting and casual, with none of the inhibiting air of posher places. In contrast to the working-class egg-and-chip cafés or middle-class ABCs [Aerated Bread Company tea rooms] the Wimpy bars have the same kind of American class neutrality as TV or Espresso bars.’⁷

Of course eating out in fast food places, or indeed any places, never became a classless activity. As with so many exciting, new, American activities that hit Britain in this period – pop music, jeans, frozen fish – classless merely became a euphemism for working class. No more so than with fast food, which over time took on a demonic quality, at least in the eyes of those who refused to eat it. Junk food for the junk classes.

This demonisation was mostly peddled by the Wood Burning Stovers, who as time went on were more than happy to have someone else cook their meal in bistros, trattorie and pho noodle bars – but not if it was ‘mechanised’, nor if it was American. McDonald’s, by the sheer force of being successful and American, became the whipping boy. By the mid-1980s, a decade after it arrived in Britain, it was expanding fast, rapidly taking market share from Wimpy and Wendy’s, another chain, and the company wanted to open an outlet in Hampstead, invariably described in tabloid newspapers as ‘leafy’. It is a particularly charming borough of north London, whose heath has majestic views down to the City and Westminster. Home of Keats, Sidney Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Edith Sitwell, it was, in its own estimation, a cut above McDonald’s. There proceeded an almighty 12-year-long row that ended up in the High Court.

‘The last rampart has fallen,’ The Times declared in 1992 when the burger chain finally won the right to open – on the site, symbolically, of a disused bookshop. Everyone quietly forgot that prior to that it had been occupied by a branch of Woolworths. The Hampstead residents, led by local MP Glenda Jackson, the only elected member of parliament to have won an Oscar, and author Margaret Drabble, insisted they were neither being snobs nor prejudiced against burger bars, they just didn’t like the idea of extra traffic and litter. The Heath and Old Hampstead Society said the result would be a rash of copy-cat chains, low-grade boutiques instead of proper shops ‘where one could buy a reel of cotton’.

The true feelings of residents, however, were revealed in a letter to Camden Council, which complained about an influx of ‘noisy undesirables’, while the actor Tom Conti said, ‘McDonald’s is sensationally ugly.’ As the Washington Post rather neatly put it, Hampstead was not so much a village, more a rather smug state of mind. The residents of Hampstead always have been Wood Burning Stovers to a man, Radio 4 devotees, owners of Ottolenghi cookbooks, recipients of organic food boxes. They sip flat white coffees from their local Ginger & White café (slogan: ‘We don’t do Grandes’), which offer organic marmite and soldiers for toddlers who have learnt to order a babycino before they can wipe their own nose.

The article in The Times reporting on the chain’s final victory in NW3 could not hide its outright snobbery: ‘The most valid objection to [McDonald’s] is in fact their ubiquity and the fact that they have done so much in 18 years to debase the act of eating. Many customers are already excavating their purchases as they walk away from the counter, smearing ketchup around their mouths and grabbing handfuls of the deep-fried toothpicks that are parodies of the honest British “chip”.’⁸

McDonald’s has undergone something of a transformation in the last six or seven years, particularly in Britain. There was certainly a time when I would never have taken my children into one of their outlets, partly because I disapproved of the food’s unhealthiness, partly because I am a reluctant owner of a wood-burning stove and quite like a flat white coffee – and with that comes a fairly large dollop of snobbism. Putting aside the issue of the food, most outlets just weren’t very nice, with harsh strip-lighting, sweaty formica tables and even less healthy-looking customers.

But the McDonald’s of the 1980s and 90s is no more. Partly spurred on by an alarming slippage in profits, partly thanks to a boss in Britain determined to tackle the hostility towards the brand, the restaurants started to go upmarket. The décor in all 1,200 branches was spruced up. Some now even have flowers on the table. The milk went organic, the eggs became free-range. Free WiFi was introduced, when this was an expensive luxury, and espresso and lattes started to be served. Then the recession came along, and it won over hundreds of thousands of new customers determined to continue enjoying a weekly meal out, or a morning cup of coffee on the way in to work, but keen to save money. Eight out of ten families in Britain with children visit at least once a year. My family is now one of those, though that horrifies some fellow north London parents.

There is still an astonishing level of animosity felt towards the golden arches, with much of it class based more than anything else. I interviewed the new British boss, Jill McDonald (no relation), who perhaps rather provocatively compared the burger chain to John Lewis, the epitome of understated Middleton taste on the high street. ‘You get the white van man in the morning stopping in for his egg McMuffin and you get the guy who has stopped off before his meeting with his laptop. There’s not that snobbishness about our brand any more,’ she said.

The reaction to the interview proved that there was still some way to go. ‘Only idiots and chavs go to McDonald’s … nobody but them would take their children there,’ said one online reader, responding to her comments. Another said: ‘I take one look at the customers inside with their noisy and totally uncontrolled offspring and back off quickly. Am I being snobbish? Probably, but I do not want to eat near that lot, nor do I want to walk about the street eating one of their products.’

Despite its move upmarket and its broad appeal to most of the country, McDonald’s will never really win over the Wood Burning Stovers, who like to think the food-on-the-go that they eat is individual, authentic and preferably ‘artisanal’. The fact that it is prepared in a big industrial kitchen on a trading estate in Park Royal, before being shipped out to their local gastro pub or sushi bar, is something they don’t consider. The key demographic for McDonald’s is Asda Mums – a large swathe of the population who straddle what some would call the lower middle class and the upper working class, but now defined in these recessionary times by their loyalty to the cheapest of Britain’s big four supermarkets. Food for Asda Mums is mostly fuel, not a statement of status. Their presiding concern is that their children are well fed, which means nutritiously so (they fret about the sugar content in Fruit Shoots), but that also means generously so. McDonald’s brilliantly supplies that need – and it is a fortnightly treat, and a guilt-free one at that, for many Asda Mums.

The company assiduously targets Asda Mums, through its advertising but also its associations, with its support of football, and tie-ups with Disney and other mass-popular movements. In a study by the think-tank Britain Thinks, undertaken during the summer of 2011, McDonald’s came third in a list of ‘the most working-class brands’ behind the Sun and Iceland and above KFC and Asda. It is revealing that four out of the five brands are food-related.

McDonald’s and KFC owe their place in this list partly to price, but partly to the ideals introduced by Wimpy back in 1954 – fast, quick service of a commoditised food. No one can ever feel as if they are going to be caught out either by their table manners, their pronunciation of a product or the arrival of a shockingly large bill at the end. Tipping and a wine list, two of the most anxiety-inducing social phenomena, are categorically absent from fast food.

The boss may be wrong about the snobs, but she is correct when she asserts that it is a ‘democratising’ brand, a term that Sir Terence Conran used in the 1960s to describe Habitat, his home furnishings shop. Thanks to fast food, eating out was no longer a social minefield.

If Asda Mums are the bedrock on which McDonald’s builds its success, then it is the Hyphen-Leighs who have turned Greggs into the country’s biggest fast food chain – with more outlets than anyone else. Based in Newcastle, Greggs has a range of nice bread, perfectly decent sandwiches and a selection of savoury pastries, selling an amazing 140 million sausage rolls every year – that is 800 every minute. But no food item in Britain, not even a Big Mac, has been the object of so much class debate in the last year. This came about when the Chancellor tried to close a long-standing (and complex) loophole that meant hot pasties, steak bakes and sausage rolls, as sold by Greggs, avoided VAT.

The political elite, many of them Wood Burning Stovers, mocked Gideon ‘George’ Osborne, son of a baronet and owner of a £3 million Notting Hill house, for failing to understand the diet of the hard-pressed working classes. Osborne’s critics had us believe that millions of Britons breakfasted, lunched and dined on pasties, rolls and onion bakes. Cheryl Cole, the Hyphen-Leighs’ pin-up of choice, was wheeled out to invoke the spirit of Oliver Twist, saying: ‘I would have been penniless as a teenager – and hungry – if I’d been taxed every time I had a hot pasty. Pasties, pizza, McDonald’s – we didn’t have a clue about nutrition. It was tasty and it was what we could afford.’

Just as bad was the sight of senior members of the shadow cabinet, including Ed Balls, trying to out-prole Osborne by sauntering into a Greggs (camera crew in tow) and casually ordering some pasties. Until Osborne made Greggs and its customers class martyrs – helped by the chain being championed by the Sun – it was widely derided, particularly by the likes of Asda Mums, for providing the lower orders with fatty, cheap pap. A ‘Greggs dummy’ was a phrase often used in the north east to refer to the sausage roll given to toddlers in their buggies to keep them quiet.

Of course selling £700 million worth of food every year means its customer base is extremely broad. Indeed, a cousin of mine who is an earl is so partial to a Greggs sausage roll that he invested some of the family fortune in the company’s shares. But then many of Britain’s aristocracy have always preferred nursery food over a ballotine de volaille and saffron infusions.

Even within something as seemingly innocuous as the lunchtime sandwich there are clear social distinctions, as evidenced in my own defiantly white-collar office. A fast-food burger or Greggs pasty is clearly unacceptable and only to be eaten ironically when suffering from a hangover. The Boots Shapers meal deal is for secretaries and junior staff in the advertising department only; the M&S sandwich, Pret à Manger wrap the safe option for the mass of mid-ranking reporters; while a box of Itsu sushi or Leon beetroot and horseradish soup is verging on ostentatious and suggests that office work is a tedious impediment to furthering one’s gourmet credentials. Columnists and those on the Arts Desk can get away with that. News editors show off by going to the local Italian delicatessen which whips up an overpriced, rather dry prosciutto and rocket ciabatta, but it comes wrapped in tasteful waxed paper. Of course, the really smart Wood Burning Stovers bring in their own sandwiches, ideally on home-made bread – or, better still, left-overs heated up in a wide-necked thermos flask. Perhaps Ottolenghi’s spiced winter couscous.

One colleague, with quiet pride, brought in home-cured bresaola. I was well and truly trumped and went back to munching on my re-heated mushroom risotto out of the Tupperware box.

These variations all occur within a very tight-knit group of (mostly) graduates, a fair few Oxbridge ones at that, working within a single office. Lunchtime choices are small, subtle public acts that allow you to set yourself apart within the restrictive office environment. Class has never been all about money. The cost of these lunches varies just a little, but the differing messages they send out are loud and clear. The home-made chorizo soup is less expensive than the Subway sandwich, but one is ‘middle class’ and one is not. If we are all middle class now, then we need to strive to distinguish ourselves from the ranks. Tucking into a sandwich from the country’s biggest eating-out operator just fails the test. Your lunch has to come from a more exclusive brand, or better still be completely unbranded.

Portland Privateers, in contrast, would rather slash the tyres on their BMW X5 than be spotted bringing a cellophane-wrapped home-made sandwich into their Mayfair office. They are remarkably unfussy about lunch, as long as it is a reputable brand. Most of them send out their secretary, or the work experience kid, for Itsu sushi or Birley sandwiches. Or they have miserable ‘water lunch meetings’ to prove how macho they are. This consists of bottled water and nothing else.

Finding unbranded food outlets in modern Britain can be a challenge. Expensive high street rents, cautious landlords, unimaginative town planners all conspire to encourage a familiar name over the door. But one of the reasons has been the relentless rise of the Middleton classes, those millions of families who within a generation have navigated their way through the choppy waters to end up at the front of the great class flotilla. If one of the abiding aspects of climbing up the social ladder is a fear of being found out, there is safety in clinging to an established name, a proven formula. The Berni Inns (founded in 1955), and all the chains that came after, allowed people to eat out, to enjoy a dash of glamour with scampi in a basket or lemongrass in the soup, but never be made a fool of. As people holidayed abroad and consumed hours of cookery programmes, restaurants became less daunting and visiting a chain outlet provided you with a failsafe option, whatever town you visited.

Berni’s place as a staging post on the climb upwards was taken by Browns, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Chez Gerard and Loch Fyne. In recent years we’ve reached the sunny uplands of Strada, Wagamama, Ping Pong, Yo! Sushi and Starbucks – all offering a bowl, or cup, of something exotic, all with unpronounceable names, all with strange, almost masonic rituals of how one orders and eats. But once we’ve cracked the formula, we have made it. The insouciance with which one mixes the wasabi into the dish of soy sauce, or orders a skinny Frappuccino, proves that you are a person who knows their mind and won’t be intimidated by any waiter or waitress – even if they have swapped their 1950s bow tie and pinafore for an attitude T-shirt and stud in their nose.