The hipster community with hatred baked in

How the opening of a bakery bred middle class snobbery and prejudice

I’ll be speaking at an event this weekend, discussing community and belonging (see below for details). To be honest, I’m not sure whether I belong to anything called a community. We live complex lives, don’t we, and dip in and out of mostly shallow relationships with people we encounter mostly fleetingly? But one thing that came to mind in preparing for the discussion was the strange case of the controversial opening of a local bakery. Yes there were other things too - the riots and the whole discussion about race, immigration, and Englishness too. Maybe they’re a bigger deal. But this little episode really brought things home to me, quite literally. I’ll come back to the bigger questions. But first, the bakery story.

It came as something of a surprise to hear that people in my local community of Walthamstow, in Northeast London, had launched a petition to close down a bakery. They love nothing more than a bakery in these parts. I often push past them on the school run as they queue for sourdough (or so I presume), negotiating their huge Amish-style child-ferrying carriages blocking the pavement outside. But what was really surprising was that these folk were not just, so it turned out, snobbishly objecting to it because it was part of a chain of what one commentator describes as ‘over-priced artisanal cafés’.

Indeed, there have been objections elsewhere, including Herne Hill in Southeast London, as the company that owns Gail’s expands its outlets. They love their independents in Walthamstow Village - the poshest, wokest part of the community, and as Time Out describes it ‘one of the most gentrified parts of north London’. While I’m a little less privileged myself, the suburb as a whole has benefited from this gentrification over recent years. Up to a point. It certainly looks a bit nicer. But as Gareth Roberts observes, there are drawbacks too:

The place is full of men with man-buns and women with toy dogs … In truth, the petition seems to be about preserving the ‘indie’ aesthetic so beloved of the middle class. Gail’s will bring in the wrong sort, don’t you know.

Which is a bit of an issue when Walthamstow, a large, deprived working class suburb, with over half its children officially living in poverty, is full of ‘the wrong sort’. I suppose I’m a reluctantly middle class interloper myself. But I was wearing my beard long before this lot arrived, and I’m not nearly as keen on its upkeep. I don’t own enough hair to erect a bun. But I do on occasion frequent the village as a member of its long-standing and inexpensive working men’s club. To be fair, even the club has probably been saved by them too. But, sadly, they bring their prejudices with them too. Otherwise, this would have been a storm in a medium cup of latte to go.

But anyway, it wasn’t just that.

They also objected because Gail’s - which has since opened and I understand is doing rather well - is a ‘Zionist bakery’. This was a new one on me. During their General Election campaign, the Liberal Democrats launched ‘Operation Cinnamon Bun’ targeting constituencies with a Gail’s because it is, apparently, a ‘byword for middle-class baked goods’. And here I was, having never heard of it before, getting into angry exchanges on a local Facebook group with anti-Gail’s campaigners, some borderline anti-semitic.

Those insisting that this maker of bread was supporting the ‘genocide’ in Gaza would meet with my quizzical responses. What? Are they bombarding the Palestinians with pain au chocolat? How does a bakery have a view on the Jewish State? How does it support a war? It’s a bloody bakery you idiots! That kind of thing.

At first glance, the campaign was inoffensive enough if you put aside the superior tone and the Jew hatred of some of its signatories. Petitioners were concerned that a Gail’s would mean ‘dismantling the character and diversity’ so important to the charm of the area. They were ‘protecting the unique identity of our community’ and ‘safeguarding the soul of a beloved neighbourhood’. But scroll down further and there were comments about ‘Zionist moguls’ and attacks on the bakery’s ‘far right’ owner. Time Out did’t notice or just decided to ignore these racist sentiments from upwardly mobile Stowers, helpfully pointing them in the direction of independent alternatives.

‘Where there’s a Gail’s, there’s likely a population of yummy mummies, intimate wine bars and eye-widening average house prices (Time Out).

So yes, guilty as charged. The founders of Gail’s were Israeli and the chair of the firm that owns Gail’s is a supporter of Israel, pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown, an environmental sceptic and anti-Woke. A combination sure to have these largely white middle-class migrants from out of town reaching for the smelling salts. As Brendan O’Neill wrote for The Telegraph, the riots and the awful events in Stockport were uppermost in most people’s minds. But it was the ‘creep of the Gail’s bakery chain into their leafy, hipster environs’ that most bothered these ‘smug intolerant liberals’ all the while ‘elbowing out the old working class’.

He dubbed their crusade as ‘ideological Nimbyism’ or a kind of ‘woke village idiocy’. An attempt to seal themselves off from moral contamination. He admonished them, and others like them, for trying to ‘dictate the moral make-up of communities’. While, as I say, the neighourhood has in some senses been lifted by these well-to-do invaders, they have also rather taken over. The petty petition, with some bitter sentiments floating just below the surface, shouldn’t be seen in isolation though. It followed Walthamstow’s hosting what was described as the UK’s biggest counter-protest against those riots.

Which was rather to misrepresent what actually happened. The ‘far right’ phantoms they were there to see off never actually turned up (and were never likely to because 1) they were phantoms and 2) it was a hoax). If these ‘counter-protestors’ fancied themselves as heirs to the Battle of Cable Street, a former councillor calling for phantom far right throats to be cut as ‘pro-Palestine’ flags fluttered nearby, rather spoilt the narrative. There were also, not long before that, ugly incidents as sectarian ‘pro-Palestine’ activists took part in angry protests in the borough and vandalised Stella Creasey MP’s constituency office.

I’m not a fan of her or her party, but I nearly voted for her. Of course, all of this frothing over somewhere to get coffee and cake is a million miles from me or my neighbours’ concerns. Or so I’d like to think. But I don’t know them well at all. The village is it’s own thing and, despite the antics of some of its more self-satisfied, attention-seeking inhabitants, most of us who occupy its less lovely parts are as bemused as everyone else. Indeed there were plenty on the online forums saying so, and a pro-Gail’s counter-petition was launched. If I do belong to a Walthamstow community, it is this one. I should get to know them.

I will be speaking at A sense of place: how to create community in a fractured world - part of the Belonging and community strand of debates at the Battle of Ideas, in London, at which I will also be speaking.

Image: Kritzolina