Chapel Street

The British cheese course used to be a wedge of cheddar at the end of dinner, eaten on a chunk of bread with a small pickle or an apple, washed down with whatever was left in the bottle. Not a tasting flight. Not a board with seven varieties and a slate. A wedge. From the wheel that had been on the slab for the past fortnight, sweating slightly under a muslin cloth, cut to order with a wire by a man who knew which one was ready. Cheddar in the West Country. Lancashire in the North West. Wensleydale in the Dales. Cheshire on the Welsh border. Stilton in the Vale of Belvoir. Caerphilly across the Severn. Each made from raw milk, from cows on the same fields the cheesemaker's grandfather had worked, aged on slate or pine in a cool room at the back of the dairy, wrapped in greaseproof paper for the customer to take home. In 1914 Britain had roughly 3,500 farmhouse cheesemakers. By 1945 the number was 126. The mechanism was specific. In 1939 a wartime law banned regional farmhouse production and compelled every dairy in the country to produce a single uniform block called Government Cheddar. Hundreds of regional cheeses, evolved over centuries on particular hillsides for particular milks, were ordered out of existence by a Ministry of Food memo in the same year war was declared. Farmhouse Wensleydale dropped from 176 producers in 1939 to 9 by 1946. The last one gave up in 1957. The restriction was lifted in 1954, too late for most. The Milk Marketing Board then guaranteed farmers a price for liquid milk until 1994, which kept on-farm cheesemaking economically pointless for another four decades. Supermarket pasteurised cheddar, made in a stainless steel plant in Wiltshire and vacuum-packed for shelf life, became, for two generations, what the word cheddar meant. A handful of producers held the line. Montgomery's still hangs cloth-bound truckles in a Somerset shed. Westcombe still does it the proper way. Mrs Kirkham's in Lancashire is one of the last raw-milk cheesemakers in the county. Their cheddar is to the supermarket product what a hand-raised Melton pie is to the petrol-station equivalent. The wheel is still being cut by the man who made it. The wire is in his hand. He will tell you about the cow, the field she grazes on, the slope of the field, the wildflowers that come up in May, and his grandfather who started the dairy in 1934, all of it free of charge, as part of buying a quarter-pound wedge from a five-stone wheel in a small Somerset dairy on a Saturday morning. You will not find any of that in a supermarket cold cabinet. Nor will you find the cheese. Which is, on reflection, the whole point.

The British wet fish van was, from roughly 1920 to 1995, the way coastal Britain delivered fresh fish to inland towns. A small refrigerated van. A man called Eric, or George, or Ron, who had been driving the route for thirty years. He left the harbour at four in the morning, after the boats had come in, with that day's catch packed on ice in plastic crates. He drove the same route every Tuesday and Thursday, through three villages and one market town, parking in the same lay-by at the same time, sounding his horn twice, and waiting while the housewives came out with their shopping bags. The slab in the back of the van, opened on a hinge, was a wet fishmonger's counter in miniature. Cod, haddock, plaice, sole, herring, mackerel, sprats, smoked haddock dyed yellow with annatto, kippers in pairs, oysters on Tuesdays if the boat had got them, brown shrimps from Morecambe Bay, cockles from the Thames estuary, and a crab or two for the household that knew how to dress one. The fishmonger boned the fillet on the lid of a plastic crate with a knife he had been using since 1976. He weighed it on a brass scale. He wrapped it in newspaper. He took the money in coins. He drove on to the next village. The wet fish van required: a coastal fishery, a working harbour, a road network, a refrigerated vehicle, a knowledgeable operator, and a population that knew what to do with a whole fish. The fishery collapsed in the 1970s through industrial overfishing. The operator retired. The population forgot what to do with a whole fish. The van is in a barn in Lincolnshire. The horn no longer sounds in any village. The North Sea is still there.

A British council estate from the 1970s. A breeding ground for many of us, from a time when we knew our neighbours and there was a decent sense of community spirit.

Somewhere in Shropshire in the 1950s.