A Century of Food in Waltham Forest
As part of the Explore Your Archive weekend, WFOHW presented a session on food and how it has been portrayed in our archive.
This collection of short extracts from Waltham Forest Oral History Workshop’s archive of recorded interviews highlights the enormous changes that have taken place in how we produce, buy, cook and eat our food since the beginning of the 20th century. You will hear memories of working in food shops and on market stalls, rearing rabbits and chickens in the garden, carrying the family meal in a pot to be cooked in the baker’s oven, getting milk in a jug from the milkman’s cart, finding a farthing in a sheet of toffee, listening for the muffin man’s bell on Sunday and much more.
“Food tasted different then, I don’t know why but it did, and we used to have a big saucepan on the hob, used to have soup in there all the time, everything used to go in there, you had a bit left over and it used to go in there, green stuff, egg, eggshells, bits of meat, and then you used to strain all the lot through a strainer and then put it back again, hot it up, used to be lovely”.
Mr Jones, born in 1904
View the PowerPoint presentation as a PDF
Sound clips
- Bill Belverstone – Pig’s trotters
- Bob Clark – Supermarkets
- De Courcy – Butchers, rabbits, Purkis
- Joe Young – Low Hall Farm cabbages
- Macropoulos – Milk delivery
- Macropoulos – The muffin man
- Miss Judd – Cheap food and bread pudding
- Miss Judd – Christmas dinner
- Miss Judd – Toffee
- Sarah Smellie – Potatoes, not rice
- Sid Revell – Deliveries
- Sid Revell – Stewpot
- Steve Davies – Imported fish
- Steve Davies – The supermarket effect
- Wood Street Purkises