Established in 1940, British Restaurants were state-subsidised dining rooms offering price-capped, nutritious meals to the public. But the story of wartime communal dining in Britain had actually begun more than two decades earlier, in the latter stages of the First World War<\/a>. In 1917 the Ministry of Food had established the National Kitchen \u2013 a network of more than 1,000 large state-subsidised canteens that functioned until 1919.<\/p>\n One of the scheme\u2019s key proponents was the pioneering vegetarian, restaurateur, real tennis Olympic medallist and all-round Edwardian man of action Eustace Miles. Writing in the ministry\u2019s 1918 Public Kitchens<\/em> handbook, he had stated: \u201cAt some future time it will be difficult to believe that each household in the country did its own separate marketing, buying small amounts of food from retail dealers a hundred per cent above cost price, that every hundred houses in a street had each its own fire for cooking, and that at least a hundred human beings were engaged in serving meals that could have been prepared by half a dozen trained assistants.\u201d<\/p>\n That was the old way of feeding the nation. Following the dour, difficult years of the First World War, Miles believed that Britain would surely embrace a brave new world of social eating. And the benefits of state-subsidised communal dining seemed obvious: economies of food and fuel, cheap and nutritious fare, and social cohesion. The National Kitchen network seemed to have made home cooking a thing of the past.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t to last. Along with other factors, the deadly postwar Spanish Flu pandemic<\/a> helped put paid to mass dining on a national scale, as large gatherings of people were deemed unsafe. Miles\u2019s ideas were also ridiculed by no less than the famous author GK Chesterton, who derided his pioneering nut-based energy bar as \u201cnutter\u201d \u2013 the first use of this derogatory term in the English language.<\/p>\n Yet despite the dismissal of his plan as being for the sandal-wearing and the wrong-headed, two decades later Miles\u2019s vision was realised on a much greater and lasting scale with the launch of the British Restaurant system. The name itself was coined by prime minister Winston Churchill<\/a>, who felt that the term \u201ccommunal feeding centres\u201d smacked of Dickensian poverty or Soviet monotony. While fulfilling the wartime priorities of patriotism, morale and affordable living, these places also had to be attractive places to visit \u2013 as a gastronome and bon viveur such as Churchill appreciated.<\/p>\n In order to overcome an institutional feel, the Ministry insisted on pleasant surroundings featuring specially commissioned artwork: some venues in London even featured paintings loaned from the royal collection at Buckingham Palace<\/a>. As with National Kitchens, British Restaurants occupied prime retail spaces on high streets, and featured music, flowers and attractive interior design \u2013 and regular inspections for cleanliness and food hygiene.<\/p>\n The British Restaurant\u2019s basic remit was to combat food and fuel price inflation \u2013 at the outbreak of the Second World War, the UK was importing two thirds of its food \u2013 and boost morale through attractive yet cheap mass urban social-eating spaces. After receiving a start-up grant from the Treasury, local governments were responsible for recruiting paid staff and management teams. Each British Restaurant was to be run on business lines, with instructions to turn over a profit or at least break even. There was a degree of autonomy over menus \u2013 but not menu costs, which had to conform to the Ministry\u2019s price structure.<\/p>\n Under retail guru and minister for food, Lord Woolton, who had made his name at the department store chain Lewis\u2019s, the state worked with private enterprise \u2013 most notably the millionaire Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 Flora Solomon of Marks and Spencer \u2013 to ensure that British Restaurants looked and felt like attractive commercial premises. Interestingly, a prominent local supporter of socialised eating was the man later held up as a paragon of entrepreneurial individualism: future prime minister Margaret Thatcher<\/a>\u2019s father, Alf Roberts, who as town councillor was responsible for bringing a communal canteen to Grantham in 1942.<\/p>\n When it came to menus, a compromise had to be struck between the Ministry\u2019s nutritionists, who were eager to get British people eating more vegetables, and a general public resistance to healthier fare. So, while the Ministry\u2019s nutritionists attempted to push thick vegetable soups and the \u201cOslo Break fast\u201d (a version of the continental breakfast), the urge to enjoy comfort food was more pressing. For people suffering the trauma of air raids, it seemed that sausage rolls, fish and chips and chocolate bars were preferable. Eventually, a compromise was struck, with meals devised to resemble the hearty yet healthy \u201cmeat and two veg\u201d fare of yesteryear.<\/p>\n In 1941, the Ministry of Information recruited popular music-hall actor Tommy Trinder to promote British Restaurants. His experience was captured in the short film Eating Out with Tommy Trinder<\/em>, in which his fianc\u00e9e and in-laws were treated to a British Restaurant meal by the eponymous star. \u201cLook what you get for four and tuppence!\u201d enthuses the relentlessly upbeat Trinder in the film, continuing: \u201cBlimey \u2013 they\u2019re giving the stuff away!\u201d<\/p>\n Aimed at working and middle-class housewives at a time when the notion of \u201ceating out\u201d would have seemed the preserve of the upper class, Trinder went on to wax lyrical about the quality of the food, its affordability, and the cutting-edge kitchen technology used to feed people en masse. \u201cNow, look, you eat at home\u2026 your one oven cooks for four\u2026 this restaurant uses four ovens and cooks for 800 people,\u201d he exclaims. \u201cIf all these people ate at home like you do, it would take 100 ovens and 100 times the gas or electricity to feed them. And they\u2019d all be peeling the spuds in the old-fashioned way \u2013 but here they\u2019ve got a machine that does it all. In go the potatoes, on goes the switch, and off come their overcoats!\u201d<\/p>\n The restaurants gained celebrity endorsements from various other \u2013 politically diverse \u2013 quarters: writers JB Priestley and Barbara Cartland, to name but two, were enthusiasts. But social eating had its detractors, too. Author Edward Blishen considered British Restaurants \u201canonymous\u201d places, because of their air of uniformity. That sentiment was echoed by Frances Partridge, a member of the Bloomsbury set, who described her local venue as \u201ca huge elephant house\u201d full of people eating \u201cenormous all-beige meals\u2026 beige mince full of lumps, and garnished with beige beans and a few beige potatoes\u201d.<\/p>\n Such sniffy verdicts belied the restaurants\u2019 success. By 1943, these venues were registering impressive net profits nationwide, suggesting both popularity and long-term viability. For the financial year 1942\u201343, net profit nation wide was \u00a397,500; for 1943\u201344, it had soared to \u00a3170,000 (between around \u00a33.5m and \u00a36m in today\u2019s money).<\/p>\n One reason for the National Kitchens\u2019 decline had been that their prices exceeded cheap tea houses such as Lyons. In 1946, by contrast, the Ministry of Food estimated that a standard British Restaurant meal cost one shilling and threepence (customers paid in cash), whereas the equivalent average price in a Lyons outlet was one shilling and tenpence \u2013 significantly higher. And yet, whereas National Kitchens raised the ire of the private retail trade by interfering with the sense of fair play associated with the free market, British Restaurants achieved a much better relationship \u2013 harmonious rather than antagonistic \u2013 with private food retailers.<\/p>\n British Restaurants represented just one arm of a greatly expanded wartime public feeding network \u2013 something that historians have largely overlooked, focusing instead on the success of the rationing system. They were the most eye-catching form of public dining, but also operated alongside other options such as factory and dock canteens, and emergency feeding in shelters. As such, a British Restaurant acted only as an \u201ceat out\u201d option, never a primary food provider: that was the function of the ration book.<\/p>\n At their peak there were 2,160 British Restaurants across the country, most on busy urban thoroughfares. The extent to which the British Restaurant became a high-street fixture is illustrated by comparison to the number of McDonald\u2019s restaurants in the UK today \u2013 about 1,300. In frequently citing Churchill\u2019s early dislike for the term \u201ccommunal feeding\u201d, historians have overlooked his later defence of British Restaurants, \u201cwhich had served a most useful purpose and should not be allowed to disappear\u201d.<\/p>\n And yet, as was the case with National Kitchens before them, disappear they gradually did. The British Restaurant outlasted the war, but its numbers were already in decline when rationing was lifted in 1954, and few survived beyond this point. This demise was chiefly due to shifting postwar trends in consumer capitalism. \u201cEating out\u201d \u2013 along with the supermarket \u2013 became more accessible and normal for the working class, and restaurants serving foreign cuisine grew in popularity.<\/p>\n But perhaps the most lingering cultural blow to British canteen dining was delivered by George Orwell<\/a>\u2019s bestselling Nineteen Eighty Four<\/a><\/em>, published in 1949. In his novel\u2019s repressive, authoritarian society, Orwell reimagined the popular BBC canteen, where he ate every day, as a subterranean dystopia in which greyish-pink slop was doled out to obedient queues of \u201cproles\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/01\/GettyImages-1360178342sml-0ac7c8b.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>A balanced diet<\/h3>\n
For the financial year 1942\u201343, the net profit for British Restaurants nationwide was \u00a397,500; for 1943\u201344, it had soared to \u00a3170,000 <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Changing tastes<\/h3>\n
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