Old Trafford's Queens of the Grill

Walk by Old Trafford stadium on a match day evening and you’ll mostly see men eating burgers. Onions spit from griddles; grill-smoke stings the eyes of the thousands of United and away fans crowding around the food vans that line the various roads that lead to the stadium. If you’d passed by a couple hours earlier you’d have seen something different: local street traders, most of them women, staking their vans and trailers onto numbered pitches, heating vats of tea for the drawn-out night ahead. The pitches outside the football grounds have been passed down through families now for generations — waiting lists are many months long, and prime spots are highly sought after and very rarely surrendered.

I first heard there might be a little more to the Old Trafford food vendors when The Mill received a tip on Instagram. It came from a woman who’d lived in Stretford back in the early 2000’s, and knew a few van owners through her father: “Mainly women and families from Odsall,” she explained, “‘salt of the earth’ as some would say, but you’d rather have them as friend than foe.” According to the tipper, it was “common knowledge” that the vans were handed down through a handful of families over the years — and if a new van came in, they never lasted particularly long. “I’m not sure how bad it got,” she says, “but it was most definitely territorial.” Of course, I immediately Googled when the next United home match day was, and when it came, I took a tram to Old Trafford to find out if rumours of a burger van mafia were true.

The very first van you’ll encounter after crossing the Trafford Road Bridge is King of the Grill. Technically, it’s the first two: Marissa, in red uniform and blue dental hygienist’s gloves, has run both of them for the past 25 years, and occupied the neighbouring pitches for the last 16 of them. These spots fall into the highly-coveted ‘Zone A’: the area covering Sir Matt Busby Way and the 1500m radius around it. There, all street traders including merchandise stalls are confined to pitches licensed by Trafford Council, and are only allowed to trade on two types of special occasion: a United game, or an Old Trafford cricket match.

Not all pitches in Zone A are created equal, and even the worst are hard to come by. Waiting lists are long, and vacancies rare, “because people don’t let go of them,” Marissa says. Worse still, many people who get themselves a Zone A spot find that they’ve waited months for a far from desirable location – like the ones directly after King of the Grill – and they quickly move on as a result. “There’s been a couple vans come and go over the years,” Marissa explains of the pitches that sit behind hers. “We’re first. It sort of tails off down the line.”

This goes far to explain the perceived territorialism. Yet Marissa tells me that, ultimately, the rival burger vans get on well. They always lend each other sauces and electric cables when one is lost or running low. The new vans don’t last because of rising costs, badly-placed pitches, and having to compete with longstanding favourites — like King of the Grill, who have cemented themselves as a part of the match day ritual. The other day, for example, Marissa went to get change from the bank, and the young man working there asked her what her business was. “I went, ‘King of the Grill’ and he was like ‘From Old Trafford? It’s like meeting somebody famous!’”

A few strides down on the corner of Sir Alex Ferguson Way, an aproned woman named Tara scrapes a griddle bare of fat. She’s worked for Grills to Fill for a few years now, but only to help her cousin out. The other day their trailer collapsed, so today she’s labouring from their back-up catering unit: a brightly lit, makeshift gingerbread house with a pointed roof, and the inside of a cottage kitchen painted on the back.

Tara’s not been working the van long, but her cousin Gill can tell me more about the changes to the industry. It’s common, I find, that one man – in this case Gill Winterbottom, the lined and guarded descendant of England manager Walter Winterbottom – works at each stall alongside a cohort of exclusively women, but this isn’t a rule, and many vans are entirely women-run. Gill's been on this spot for years. He doesn’t tell me exactly how long — instead he points to the landmarks around us that weren’t there when he started: the Premier Inn, and the Metrolink stop that was built where the Sam Platts pub burned down. “Things change,” he shrugs. It used to be that to sell food outside Old Trafford, all you needed was a van and a Street Trading Concession. 

Then, too many traders showed up, licensing laws were tightened, and pitches came into place. “If you look round, there’s all pitch numbers,” he says, gesturing vaguely into the winter night around us, and at his own pitch number, 75. He points out the different vans and tells me off the top of his head how long each one of them has been there: 30 years, 25 years. “Him over there, he’s only been here about three seasons,” he says, and then he shifts his gaze to a small van over the road and adds: “and the Asians on the corner, it’s their first day!”

On the corner, Manpreet, Jaswinda, and Amandeep crowd together in a small, metallic van. Val stands outside it. The proud proprietors of Curry in a Hurry, they’re not actually a burger van, but bizarrely they keep the same mysterious one-man-many-women formula that the burger van business apparently seems to warrant. The four of them live just around the corner in Stretford. It is indeed their first day at Old Trafford, and a historic day at that, as Val tells me they’re the first Indian food vendor in the history of the ground.

For the occasion, they’ve patented their own invention: ‘The Curry Cup’ — which is exactly what it sounds like. The family tell me they’d been trying to get a Zone A pitch for over a year. “It’s so hard to get a spot here,” Val says. “You have to go through the council. I’ve been knocked back so many times.” Now that they’re here, they’ve found curry to be a hard sell initially, as no one knew they were coming. “They weren’t expecting us,” Val says, “but you could hear everyone talking about us. It’s going to pick up soon hopefully.”

By stark contrast, the next person I speak to, Leandra, is the vendor I meet who’s been here the longest. In her 40s, she’s worked the van since she was a child. She smiles easily and frequently, offering me tea from her vat. Her mum ran her van before her. “I used to be on a bread tray on that counter when I was a baby,” she laughs, gesturing behind her. Leandra’s two daughters, Maddison and Amelia, were in the bread tray too, and in the next few months she’ll be a grandmother. “So I’ve already said, that baby is most definitely gonna go in a bread tray,” she says. “Because it has to!”

Leandra recalls how, until the age of 10 or 11, her mother would stand her by the drinks fridge at the back of the van, where she was only allowed to “cut the bread and serve the pop”. Gradually, as she got older, she was given a little more responsibility. “And at the end of a day's work, I’d get 10, 15 quid, and my mum was distraught handing it over!” she laughs. However, so long as she was still a child, she was never allowed to work when United were playing Liverpool, or City, for fear of her seeing the fights that often ensued.

This isn’t the only time a vendor I speak to hints at an undercurrent of violence. The people working at BBQ Barn tell me that, earlier that day, they’d had a man kick off at their only male member of staff, Harry. “He said he was gonna stab me, and that he’ll see me in jail, and then he called me a paedophile,” Harry laughs. Asked whether this behaviour is more typical of home or away fans, he tells me that he thinks the trouble normally comes from United supporters. “Because the default line is ‘I’m gonna come back here next match and set you on fire,’” he says. “But I never really ask the people threatening me who they support.”

Hillary from Bullshed explains that this violence is the very reason most vans have one man on staff at all times. Take Jake, for example, the seemingly seven foot tall James McAvoy lookalike she keeps behind the till. “Since we’ve had Jake we don’t have any trouble,” she assures me needlessly. But before Jake, people would verbally harass them, lie about what food they’d received, threaten them, and often run away without paying. “So now we like to have one guy around in case there’s any trouble,” she explains.

But other than that, all of Hillary’s colleagues are women and girls. “It’s very rare that we have a man on staff,” she admits. “You’ve got to clean, and count all the money, and you’ll find that lads don’t like washing up.” She tells me that all the women in her van, and indeed most of the vans, have other jobs. Hillary herself is a customer service adviser, and she took half a day off work to come here today. Some of her colleagues are teachers. One girl, she tells me, moonlights as a “lady rapper”.

There are many other reasons why the vans are run by women. Harry tells me they’re just better at it. Marissa from King of the Grill thinks people just like being served by women more. Besides, men are often otherwise occupied on the occasion. “I’ve got a husband, but he’ll be watching the match!” she laughs.

Together, these women (as well as the Jakes and Harrys and Gills of the world, of course) form a parallel institution to the stadium itself, one no less important to maintaining the ecosystem that is Old Trafford. Perhaps it’s even more important: one final bastion of consistency and joy in a game that seems to be lacking it more than ever. “Every season we get more customers,” says Hillary when I ask her if business has declined over the years. “We’ve not gone down in any way. Even though the team’s doing rubbish.”

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