Is the Chinese chippy Lancashire’s new traditional cuisine?

It’s the very first day of the Year of the Snake and I’m slithering my way across the Pennines. Travelling from West Yorkshire and up and down into East Lancashire, there are a few indications that you’ve crossed a county line. One of the first things you see is a large stone bus stop that a resident once told me was the highest bus stop in all of Lancashire, though I’ve never been able to prove it. Next to that is a large stone house, which that same resident happens to live in, and he told me it was home to the best tap water in all of Lancashire when I knocked on his door one hot day and asked him to fill up my bottle. But other than these two notable landmarks, the Lancastrian signposts are few and far between. The hills are the same: green and lovely. The houses are the same: sandstone with the odd concrete estate. In fact, the only difference I’ve picked up on, save for a discrepancy in the species of rose that adorns the occasional council notice, is that while on the West Yorkshire side of the border there are Chinese restaurants and then there are chippies, once over into East Lancashire, the combination Chinese chip shop reigns supreme — heavenly places where Chop Suey dishes lie side by side with the jumbo sausage.

And I know that one of you will live in, say, Slaithwaite, and be foaming at the mouth ready to tell me that I’m wrong. ‘They have those in Yorkshire too,’ you’ll say, and you’ll be right, but I’m talking about the borderlands here, and a general trend. Because the fact is that the textile towns of East Lancashire, landlocked as they may be, have a far richer history of fish and chip punting than their nearby Yorkshire counterparts.

It was on a street in East Lancashire (now Greater Manchester) that the fish first met the chip. This is a claim that Londoners have long tried to nab for themselves. It’s certainly true that the fried fish first came to the UK via the capital, brought over in the 16th Century by Jewish refugees fleeing the Spanish Inquisition; likewise, Oldham can lay claim to the UK’s oldest chip shop when in 1860 or thereabouts a fried chip vendor set up shop in the now soon-to-be-demolished Tommyfield Market. 

But as for fish and chips, together? It wasn’t until approximately 1863 that two fish and chip shops appeared almost in tandem: one in London, one in Mossley, neither of them remotely close to the sea. In London, the fish-chip marriage was said to have been consummated within the sound of the Bow Bells, which would make the chippy tea by rights a cockney delicacy. There, a Jewish rug weavers’ son named Joseph Malin was already selling chips, most likely from a tray around his neck, to supplement his family’s income. At the age of 13, genius struck him when he visited a nearby fried fish shop, and the resulting combination proved so popular that soon enough the family were able to afford a shop to host their newfound trade.

Thus the first chippy began — if you’re inclined to believe Southerners, which I’m not. The story itself may be true, but the real first fish and chip shop was bestowed upon this earth in Mossley. Here, a man by the name of John Lees first started punting the winning combo from a wooden hut in Mossley market, and by 1889 he’d moved into a brick and mortar — a small shop called the Enterprise Supper Bar, on Stamford Street by the Stamford Arms.

Heretics at the National Federation of Fish Friers awarded a blue plaque to the London premises for oldest fish and chip shop back in 1968. In a Guardian article from the same year, which details the enemy chip shops’ fight for the title, Mr B. W. Ashurst, member of the federation and editor of The Fish Friers Review, is quoted saying that, regardless of the dispute between the two, “whoever brought fish and chips together had no thought of the earth-shaking significance of his idea.” This just goes to show what unmatched distances the ignorance of the fish fryer federation travels, as John Lees knew exactly the significance of his invention, so much so that he had the foresight of having ‘Chip Potato Restaurant Oldest Estd. in the World’ etched onto the window of his shop. Nowadays that very same shop is occupied by Man’s Wok — a Chinese chippy.

Which brings me back to my original point. Driving through Rossendale, you’ll see far more ‘Chinese & English Takeaways’ than Chinese or English takeaways. Take Bacup for example, the first town over the border, which has a population of under 14,000. It has five Chinese fish and chip shops, one regular fish and chip shop, and no solely Chinese takeaway. That’s a Chinese chippy per 2,800 people, or 0.00035 Chinese chippies per capita (assuming the population is 14,000, which it isn’t quite).

We don’t know how this phenomenon came about, but there are theories. In their article ‘Chow mein and chips: a brief history of the British Chinese takeaway’, Jamie Coates and Niamh Calway write that “[m]any citizens of former British colonies such as Malaysia and Hong Kong who migrated to the UK started working in the food sector. From the 1950s onwards, they began renting vacant fish and chip shops in small towns and villages.” According to the writers, rural areas were likely to have fewer takeaway options available, so perhaps fish and chips were their only stock and store. For this reason, those who took over the restaurants took special care to maintain the original dishes to a high standard, as well as adding their own — unlike in the city, where a standalone Chinese restaurant could be warranted.

But this isn’t the full story. Going back to the early 1900s, the Chinese population in the UK was known not for owning restaurants, but laundrettes. When in the 1960s it became affordable and even popular to have an electric washing machine in your house, many of the laundrettes converted into restaurants — and many owners sought new premises from which to enter the hospitality business.

We know that many of them took over chippies, but do we know exactly why? Well, I did speak to about ten different Chinese chippy owners for this piece, and though not one of them could tell me the origin story of their business, a few of them were able to give me an approximate date for when it began. 

Elly runs a chippy called Canton House. She moved from Hong Kong to Wakefield 15 years ago, and then to Greater Manchester where two years ago she and her family took over the business. Before that, Canton House had already been a Chinese chippy for at least 40 years, though Elly knows very little about the previous owners or how the business came to be. 

Mark from Good Choice chippy tells a slightly more detailed story. He and his partner have run Good Choice for 20 years, but the history of the shop goes back a lot further. The premises has been a chip shop for over 60 years, running as a regular fish and chip shop for the first third or so, before it was taken over by a different English couple who ran the shop in tandem with a woman from Hong Kong, as a Chinese chippy, until Mark and his wife took over and kept up the theme.

This evidence is consistent with that provided by the majority of shops I speak to, meaning that many of the restaurants converted from standard fare chip shop to Chinese chip shop not in the post-war ’50s, or the Automated-Washing-Machine boom of the ’60s, but in the late ’70s and early ’80s. What stone was cast 50 years ago that rippled and spread into this cultural phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to be borderline unnoticeable today?

What happened was the 1975 potato shortage, also known as the Standpipe Drought. It was caused by what the aforementioned Fish Fryers Federation referred to as “a conspiracy of elements”. Potatoes were planted late that year due to an unusually wet winter in 1974, which was exacerbated by surprise frosts in early January, followed by a long and devastating dry spell. Many farmers began harvesting the smaller potatoes usually left behind for cows, a move that resulted in further shortages extending even into 1976. An archival news feature from July 1975 on the shortage shows how potato prices “soared from 7 to 20 pence a bag” with the days of the 50p bag on the horizon. That’s £3.81 per bag, accounting for inflation — not quite riot-worthy prices, but not far off. The documentary estimates that by that point in time, almost half the chip shops in the country had closed down, though the presenter remains optimistic that this is just a holiday and that the owners will soon return, albeit “to a situation even worse than the one they left.”

But the reality is, of course, that there’s no conclusive, single origin story to the Chinese chippy. They arose organically and gradually, spurred on by various historical catalysts, much like most cultural phenomena — except the fish and chip combo itself which, again, was invented in a single moment by John Lees. The shop owners I speak to have considerably mixed feelings about the Chinese-adjacent dishes they sell. Fen Xia tells me that the food she sells at the New Man Lung chip shop in Rossendale “is for the English people. It’s not really traditional for us,” and says I’ll have to go to China if I want the real thing. Elly from Canton House feels similarly. “The so-called Chinese food here, most of it doesn’t really appear in my country,” she says, telling me that years and years of mixing of the cultures has altered the food to match English tastes. “You know, prawn toast, chicken balls, I’ve never seen them in my life in Hong Kong,” she says. “And we wouldn’t go into a takeaway and order a pie. Pie’s not really a Chinese thing. We don’t eat pie.”

So the food is only vaguely reminiscent of traditional Chinese food. But do the people who serve it actually like it? “Oh yeah, I eat anything,” Elly says. “But my partner, it’s not for him.” Mark, on the other hand, seems borderline enthusiastic about the dishes they serve, and tells me he’s a big fan of fish and chips — though he still goes into Chinatown to get proper Cantonese roast duck.

But even if the food isn’t authentically Chinese, it still stands that the Chinese chippy has in some areas replaced or at the very least matched the English chippy as your traditional takeaway option — more traditional, certainly, than any of those self-proclaimed ‘Traditional English Fish and Chip Shops’ that you get on Manchester high streets. Chinese-British food has evolved into an entity in and of itself; a cuisine that amounts to considerably more than just the sum of its parts. Because even if the Chinese isn’t really that Chinese, or the English food not really that English, where else can you get stir-fried bamboo shoots as a side for your mystery-meat and potato pie?