Making Provision: a Centenary Hi

For many years before 1887 Britain's buyers and sellers of (mostly imported) bacon, ham, lard, butter, cheese, and canned meat had constituted what they considered an exclusive section of the food trade - the provision trade. In the metropolis it was conducted on the quays and markets between London Bridge and the Tower of London, first on the north bank of the Thames and before the turn of the century on the south - in Tooley Street. In Making Provisions, Hugh Barty-King tells how, when Britain's population outgrew its ability to feed itself, London-based agents took over from Irish and West Country farmers as the main source of London's food supply; and how London importers and the wholesalers who were their customers established the Home and Foreign Produce Exchange as a provision market and trade association to agree minimum prices, regulate the trade and limit competition. He tells in fascinating detail the story of their struggle to keep provisions distinct from the goods traded by grocers and butchers, poulterers and fishmongers, and to maintain the traditional tiered structure of trading against the impatience of multiple chais and cooperative societies wishing to eliminate the intermediary 'margins' and order direct from the producer. In a swiftly moving narrative, in which generations of the same family play their parts, the reader sees the effects on the provision trade of two world wars and the changes brought by motor transport, the telephone and teleprinter, marketing boards, refrigeration, canning, containerization, prepackaging, new eating and shopping habits, supermarkets, the cash-and-carry revolution - and, more profoundly than all else, Britain joining the EEC.