ABSTRACT
From medieval times onwards street foods have been a common feature of the British
urban landscape (Tinker, 1987). With few lower class households having a kitchen,
sending meat out to be cooked in an oven or buying hot foods from cookshops and
street vendors were common practices, predating contemporary fast foods by several
centuries (Mennell et al., 1992). The development of taverns, coffee houses, 'private
hotels', workplace canteens and restaurants in the following centuries all popularised
and refined the notion of 'eating out'. In the 1980s and 1990s there has been a
particularly marked growth in the contemporary UK 'foodscape' (Yasmeen, 1992).
