Nicholas Saunders was a counterculture pioneer with an endless stream of quixotic schemes and a yearning to spread knowledge – but his true legacy is a total remaking of the way Britain eats
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/jan/23/nicholas-saunders-forgotten-genius-changed-british-food
f you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out how to unblock a drain without calling a plumber, which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted Nicholas Saunders.
A tall young man with a wild beard that gave him the look of a shaman, Saunders was obsessed with documenting how the new global counterculture was changing the ancient city around him. In 1970, at the age of 32, he self-published his findings in a slim but dense guidebook called Alternative London. The book was testament to Saunders’ belief that information should be made available to all, and that this information should be rigorously tested. For the section on abortions, Saunders had a friend phone up each provider in the city, in the process uncovering a London-wide scam of clinics that marketed themselves as “cheap” but in reality were charging over double the non-profit rate. By 1974, Alternative London and its subsequent revised editions had sold close to 200,000 copies and become an underground bible.
Like many people who grow up around wealth, Saunders was attuned to how money flowed, and he loved circumventing official systems in order to find bargains for himself. “He didn’t want to spend any more money than he had to,” Anja Saunders, his partner during his final years, told me. “He was always looking to make something efficient.” In 1974, using £7,000 he had inherited from his recently deceased great aunt, he bought a former banana warehouse overlooking a triangular shard of courtyard in Covent Garden, which was going cheap owing to the looming redevelopment of its wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Two years later, Saunders started selling dry foods from the warehouse, enabling the type of people who had read Alternative London to stock up on rice, nuts and muesli for their communes. It was a success, and with the profits, Saunders added a bakery, a mill and a coffee roastery, all of which shared the same courtyard.
By the autumn of 1977, the coffee house was thriving and Saunders needed new premises. Anita Le Roy, a customer at the warehouse, recalls Saunders coming to the furniture shop where she worked with a proposition: “Want to start a business?” At 28, she knew nothing about coffee sourcing and less about business, but she was exacting about taste. She agreed – on the condition that she choose the coffee. In 1978, Saunders found a property nearby that could fit a roaster in the basement. He and Le Roy filled out the interior with wooden cubicles that looked like confessional booths, in imitation of the old Jacobean London coffee houses. They named the business after the street it was on: Monmouth Coffee.
Saunders was always looking for the next thing, and if it didn’t already exist, he would make it himself. In the winter of 1978, back in London after a holiday in Greece, he found himself craving proper Greek yoghurt: dense and creamy with a lactic tang and golden skin. This was a time when supermarkets mainly sold yoghurts with added sugar and flavouring, while unadulterated yoghurt – a pallid, joyless thing – was sold in health shops run by puritanical hippies. In search of his perfect yoghurt, Saunders scoured libraries for recipes, consulted a man called “Nick the Greek” who supplied all of London’s Greek restaurants, forced friends to bring back souring yoghurt on the plane and even went to the island of Paros to grill farmers. Everyone told him the same thing: it’s not possible.
Most people would have given up, but Saunders was not most people. “Anyone can do it,” he was fond of saying to sceptics. “It’s really quite simple.” The next year, he decided to start a dairy. He enlisted the help of a friend at the bakery, who, in turn, recruited Randolph Hodgson, a young man with a cherubic face and mop of blond hair who had just completed a food science course. Saunders, who was suspicious of insider knowledge, bluntly told Hodgson his degree was useless. Still, Saunders saw in him a pleasing willingness to try new things and he tasked Hodgson with the yoghurt project.
When the dairy opened in July 1979, it did indeed sell its own yoghurt. Unfortunately, it tasted disgusting. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that staff realised the vile taste had been caused by the newly varnished incubation cupboards. After a few months, the dairy found its feet selling ice-cream and homemade soft cheeses. Eventually, even the yoghurt began to taste good. As with Monmouth Coffee, the new business was given a name with a nod to its location: Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Almost 50 years later, the dairy and coffee house Saunders helped conjure out of nothing have been almost inconceivably influential. There is strong evidence to suggest that the first commercially made flat white served in the UK was made with Monmouth beans, while if you walk into a cheese shop in the UK today, there’s a good chance the monger will proudly say they worked at “The Dairy”, without having to qualify which one. They are not only “the yardsticks by which other cheese shops and coffee emporiums are judged”, according to the writer Matthew Fort, but have also been responsible for the success of artisanal food producers across the country who have revived – in some cases, reinvented – British food traditions. While the 60s counterculture helped export British music, films and theatre to the world, today we also export our chefs, produce and restaurant culture. In 2021 alone, Neal’s Yard Dairy sold €1m of British cheese to France.
Yet Saunders himself remains relatively unknown. When he died in 1998, he received few obituaries, and since then his fame has receded further. Even now, it’s hard to pin down exactly who Saunders was, not least because he was so many things at once: a hippy, a capitalist, a pioneer, a property developer, a drugs advocate, a social inventor, a greengrocer, a visionary. Yet a consistent philosophy guided everything he did: he believed, above all, that information should be wrested from gatekeepers and made free for people to use. “He didn’t just make information available, but made you feel like anyone has the capacity to go and do it,” Hodgson recalls. “He lit a fire inside people.” With this philosophy, Saunders’ dairy and coffee house have not just been influential in their own field; together they have been the two transformational businesses in the modern British food culture.
From the vantage point of the 21st century, it’s difficult to fully comprehend how dire British cuisine once was. “We are notoriously the worst and most wasteful cooks in Europe,” a British food journal of 1870 begins. It would get much worse before it got any better. The twin ruptures of the Industrial Revolution and rationing during both world wars, which didn’t fully end until 1954, meant that knowledge of traditional food production ceased being handed down. At its low ebb, British cuisine was characterised by the hangovers of wartime austerity: sandwiches lubricated with mayonnaise made from water, flour and powdered egg; waterlogged cabbage; hotels serving French food that resembled la grande cuisine as much an episode of ’Allo ’Allo! does a Jean Renoir film. Even worse was the decline of British produce. Shops sold chalky, greying bread made with adulterated flour; tasteless, factory-produced cheese; and increasingly bland varieties of fruit and vegetables made homogenous for the supermarkets.
There are two well-worn narratives that explain how British food recovered. The first places the revolution in the 1950s with a small cadre of upper-middle class writers inspired by Europe and its peasant cooking, who asserted that good taste could be found in simple, unadorned cooking that relied on good ingredients. Postwar Britain under rationing was not an easy place to recreate this food. Garlic, so crucial to Elizabeth David’s 1950 debut Book of Mediterranean Food, was a rarity (the following year, it became the first luxury ever chosen on Desert Island Discs). David admitted that “the production of high quality foods in this country is so small … that only a negligible minority of people ever set eyes on [them].” The result was that peasant food became a desirable aesthetic for the upper-middle classes, difficult to maintain and available to just a few devotees.
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Obituary: http://www.stain.org/nicholas/independant.html
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Michael Daunt
Fisherman and raconteur
Michael Daunt, who has died aged 81, was a leading fisherman and instructor, author and journalist, in the league of Negley Farson, Hugh Falkus and Conrad Voss Bark. In his time, he taught Spey salmon and brown-trout casting to Chris Tarrant, Eric Clapton, Jeremy Paxman, Guy Ritchie, Max Hastings, Ronnie Corbett, Debo Duchess of Devonshire and others.
A convivial figure and a raconteur, he was known to family and friends as “The Bounder”, a soubriquet in which he revelled. “In another life I think he would have been imprisoned,” was the verdict of his friend Paxman, author of Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life.
“I could never believe someone like that could still exist.” Daunt’s own website boasted: “He has caught salmon in Russia’s bleak Kola Peninsula, marlin off the coast of Kenya, bone fish in the Bahamas, clap in Malaya, crabs in London.”
Daunt’s thwarted ambitions to become an actor were compensated for by a nine-year affair with the actress, Jill Melford, and his friendships with Lee Marvin, Dirk Bogarde and above all Richard Burton, with whom he had long lunches.
“I would begin with fragments of poetry and he would finish off the lines,” Daunt recalled. “I would do it just to hear his beautiful Welsh voice. Could I keep up with him on the drinking front? Not a chance”
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