How the humble pizza conquered Britain

Telegraph

11 hours ago

The sleepy town of Bushey, a stone's throw from Watford on the outer reaches of north-west London, is not the type of place you'd typically call a culinary hotspot.
Yet on Bushey's innocuous high street, nestled alongside a hardware store, charity shop and dog-grooming parlour, sits one of Britain's most popular restaurants, attracting visitors from across the world.
Vincenzo's, opened in 2022 by former teacher Tom Vincent, does not offer Michelin-starred fine dining, but rather the humble pizza.
'People come here from all over the world,' says Vincent. 'When we opened this shop, we were selling out in 30 seconds. That's 200 pizzas in 30 seconds. As much as we can fit in the oven, in the fridges and make with these hands.'
Vincent, a self-proclaimed Americanophile, styled his tiny restaurant on the family-run pizzerias of New York. Its walls are adorned with paintings by Vincent himself, including one portrait of the fictional mob enforcer Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos.
'Eating all the pizzas there, I loved the culture,' he says. 'What I noticed was different [to Britain]. There were families, tradition, big characters – we hadn't got that here.'
His small business has been lavished with praise from influencers, food writers and fellow chefs alike, and Vincent is now planning to open a larger, second restaurant in Shoreditch, east London.
In the long run, he hopes to turn Vincenzo's into a group.
However, he is not the only one harbouring such ambitions, as barely a week goes by without local headlines hailing the expansion of a new pizzeria in another town or village.
'We are in a very dynamic and very dog-eat-dog world at the moment when it comes to the pizza industry,' says Eric de Luca, operations director at Alley Cats, which runs two New York-style pizza sites in west London and is opening a third.
This fierce competition highlights how Britain remains in the grip of a pizza phenomenon.
In recent years, high streets have been flooded by pizzerias, offering everything from softer Neapolitan-style pizzas to larger Romano alternatives with thin, crispy bases.
Popularity is such that the sale of sourdough-style pizzas has almost become a signifier of an area on the up.
In Vincent's case, some commentators have credited him with pioneering a new approach, dubbing his pizzas 'London-style' owing to their American portion sizes combined with a European approach to toppings and ingredients.
'It's the journalists, food critics that have coined it, not us,' he insists.
Amazingly, some of the pizza-makers receiving the highest acclaim don't even run their own restaurants.
Crisp, one of the most feted pizza kitchens in London, is a bare-bones operation in a pub in Hammersmith, west London. Ace Pizza, a small but growing pizza business run by chef Rachel Jones, also started life in a boozer, over in Hackney, east London.
'You put good pizza in a struggling pub and the [drinks] sales go up, while it creates a home for the pizza-maker,' says Vincent.
Some are even aspiring to push the boundaries of what pizza can be, in a move that will no doubt enrage traditional Italians devoted to the original.
Michele Pascarella, the founder of Napoli on the Road, a restaurant in Chiswick, west London, that has repeatedly been named Europe's best pizzeria, is in the process of opening a site in Soho that will have a pizza-inspired tasting menu.
'We're going to play around making different kinds of dough, triple-cooked dough, fried, cooked in the oven – a lovely quality product and seasonal, the way you would [get] in a Michelin-star restaurant,' he says.
It all speaks to Britain's modern obsession with what was once an Italian working-class staple, tracing its origins back centuries as a cheap and convenient meal.
According to recent estimates, the average Briton consumes almost 6,000 slices in their lifetime, equivalent to more than 730 whole pizzas. Pizza Express alone sells 18.4 million per year.
Its popularity outweighs traditional British dishes like fish and chips.
Pizza is Britain's fourth-favourite dish to order when eating out, according to hospitality data firm CGA, behind only chicken, burgers and fries.
Britons spent just under £3bn on pizza from restaurants and takeaways in the year to July, according to data from Worldpanel, and a further £1.4bn on frozen and chilled pizzas in supermarkets.
Unsurprisingly, these flourishing sales have captured the attention of profit-hungry investors.
Fulham Shore, the company behind sourdough pizza chain Franco Manca, was bought by the Japanese food giant Toridoll and investment firm Capdesia for £93m in 2023, while Pizza Pilgrims, which runs 20 sites across the UK, was acquired last week by the German chain L'Osteria for an undisclosed sum.
Yet, this flurry of deals has sparked concerns that they are piling into the market too late.
After years of rapid growth, sales in both the supermarkets and restaurants are slowing, having fallen compared to 2024.
This has already led to larger chains like Pizza Hut and Papa Johns running into financial trouble, with the latter closing dozens of sites.
In fact, pizza was the only type of fast food to post a drop in new store openings over the first half of 2025, according to data from hospitality industry analysts Meaningful Vision, falling by 0.6pc.
'What I see is brands growing, but at the expense of older brands failing,' says Simon Stenning, hospitality industry expert and director of Future Foodservice. 'I can't see significant growth in the consumption of pizza from where it is now.'
At the same time, restaurants are battling soaring labour costs and higher taxes following Rachel Reeves's Budget, which has also led to fewer people eating out owing to cost of living concerns.
This therefore raises the question: could Britain be approaching peak pizza?
Humble origins
The sheer variety of options available to British pizza lovers nowadays would have been unfathomable 60 years ago, when the young entrepreneur Peter Boizot opened the first Pizza Express on Wardour Street in Soho, central London.
Boizot had just returned from a trip to Italy, finding inspiration in its vibrant food culture.
His first restaurant was a modest affair, offering square slices of pizza cooked in an oven imported from Naples, sold through a hole in the wall and served in greaseproof paper with plastic cutlery.
Simple it may have been, but it sparked a revolution that shapes how we eat out today.
David Page, a former chief executive of Pizza Express, says pizza introduced post-war Britons to a kind of aspirational and accessible dining.
Page, who joined Pizza Express as a dishwasher in 1973, says in the early days 'there were queues at lunch and queues at dinner, because, quite frankly, for 20 years, there was nothing else around', he says.
'You ate in pubs, but badly. There were fish-and-chip shops and greasy spoon cafes. There were posh hotels with restaurants, but that was very expensive.'
At the same time, international air travel had become more affordable, giving people the chance to explore Europe and try pizza for the first time.
'People got to know sangria and tapas when they went to Spain, and they got to know pizza from Italy,' says Page.
'And there was a mass importation of ideas and people into the UK.'
Page joined Pizza Express to supplement his income while he trained to become a teacher.
However, he later abandoned a burgeoning career in the classroom when offered the chance to run a franchise restaurant.
He rose through the ranks to become Pizza Express's chief executive in 1993, floating the company on the London Stock Exchange and growing it to around 300 sites alongside the well-known investors Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond.
'It was incredibly exciting and satisfying,' says Johnson. 'We would go off to Leeds or Edinburgh or Dublin or wherever and bring something to the city that they hadn't really experienced before.
'We came with a degree of fanfare because by that time, the brand had a reputation. It was seen as new and – I know it sounds ridiculous in a way – but glamorous.
'It was relatively classless, which I think was part of its appeal, in that, you know, we had educated customers, people from different backgrounds, it didn't matter.'
Johnson sold his share in Pizza Express in 1999 and went on to found the Italian chain Strada. Page, meanwhile, left the company when it was taken private by private equity firm TDR Capital – best known today as the owners of struggling supermarket Asda – in 2003.
He later went on to purchase the sourdough pizza business Franco Manca, which he also turned into a nationwide success. With Page at the helm, he launched an assault on his former employer by undercutting it on price and luring younger customers with fashionable sourdough bases.
After achieving a personal fortune built on pizza, it is now ironic that Page first failed to see how he could make it a success outside of London.
'As a Londoner, I was very rude about the rest of the country ... Of course, I was completely wrong,' he says. 'When we opened on Banstead High Street [in Surrey], one of the customers wrote to me and said it was the most exciting thing that had happened since the Germans destroyed the library in 1942.'
Pizza Express wasn't the only company to bring pizza to the UK.
US chain Pizza Hut opened its first site in Britain in 1973, while Domino's crossed the Atlantic in 1985.
The latter's debut was a crucial milestone in popularising the pizza as a takeaway staple rather than just something to be eaten in a restaurant.
'There were three big pizza businesses – Pizzaland, Pizza Hut and Deep Pan Pizza – all of which were much bigger than Pizza Express in 1993 when we took control of it,' says Johnson.
However, it was arguably the first to properly win over the middle classes.
'It raised expectations of what pizza should be like,' he adds. 'We had a proper wine list and decent coffee. And overall, it was a more sophisticated experience than pizzerias had been before.'
As Pizza Express expanded, a flood of rival brands such as Ask, Bella Italia and Zizzi entered the market.
By the turn of the millennium, private equity firms were ploughing millions into mid-market chains, heralding the beginning of a casual-dining boom that changed the face of British high streets.
'The food scene in Britain had been seen as unsophisticated and not very cosmopolitan,' says Johnson. 'Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, London became one of the great dining-out locations in the world, and Pizza Express was part of that transformation.'
It didn't last forever. During the latter years of the 2010s, consumers began to lose interest in cookie-cutter brands, with many chains creaking under the weight of heavy debts incurred by ambitious expansion plans.
In 2018, both Strada and Prezzo were forced to close swathes of sites, while a year later Pizza Express posted a £350m loss amid pressures from a £1.1bn debt pile.
When the pandemic hit, Pizza Express was plunged into crisis and forced to negotiate a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) with creditors that saw 73 sites close with more than 1,000 job losses.
Since the pandemic, things have remained tough for hospitality.
Soaring inflation pushed up the price of fuel and ingredients to excessive levels, while the cost of living crisis caused customers to cut back.
While inflation has since fallen, restaurants are now having to deal with rises in National Insurance (NI) and the minimum wage.
'The economics have changed in a bad way, such that any restaurant business – whether it's a full-service, sit-down bistro or a pizzeria – is going to feel increased expenses,' says Johnson.
The impact of Reeves's tax raid is already being felt, compounded by food inflation hitting 4.5pc in June.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics in July revealed the loss of 69,000 jobs in the hospitality sector since the Chancellor's Budget.
Paula MacKenzie, the chief executive of Pizza Express, says the NI rises 'caught us all on the hoof', meaning the company is now looking to cut costs and become more efficient.
Other big pizza brands are also sounding the alarm. Domino's, the UK's biggest pizza company, warned it faces a 'tougher' takeaway market as it posted a drop in profits earlier in August.
'There's no getting away from the fact that the market has become tougher both for us and our franchisees, and that's meant that the positive performance across the first four months didn't continue into May and June,' Andrew Rennie, its chief executive, recently told investors.
'Given weaker consumer confidence, increased employment costs and uncertainty ahead of the autumn statement, franchisees are taking a more cautious approach to store openings for the time being.'
Sector-wide challenges nearly led to the collapse of Pizza Hut's UK business earlier this year, which was only averted following a pre-pack rescue deal with the investment firm Directional Capital.
Meanwhile, the UK arm of Papa Johns recently revealed a £21.8m loss in 2024, which prompted the closure of more than 70 sites.
A Papa Johns spokesman says these are 'not new developments' and took place over two years as part of a review of the business, insisting it is 'profitable when excluding restructuring costs'.
Whether these cases are a reflection on the popularity of pizza itself, though, is up for debate.
After all, while total pizza sales have fallen in the last year, they are still significantly higher than in 2022 and 2023.
Johnson thinks it has more to do with weakness in the delivery market than any significant drop in demand.
'I think delivery has probably peaked in some respects, and has become pretty expensive once you add on all the costs,' he says.
'And although pizza carries pretty well as a delivery product, it's never going to be as good as the one where you can see in the oven being cooked. I also happen to think that the delivered products from those brands are simply not as good.'
'I've given up having pizza delivered because it tends to arrive lukewarm,' adds David Milner, the chairman of the Italian food brand Crosta & Mollica, which sells chilled pizzas in supermarkets.
With big chains struggling to grow, Vincent says people are seeking out more interesting and authentic pizzas and moving away from big chains.
This is in a similar vein to the craft beer boom of the early 2010s, which saw small-batch, hoppy IPAs marketed as an exciting alternative to mainstream beers.
'When I was young, we'd go to Pizza Express, TGI Fridays and stuff like that, and people blindly supported chains because we thought that's what was cool,' he says.
'Since lockdown, people want to support local. And it's much cooler to be going to somewhere that's owned independently.'
When it comes to making money, many business owners believe they have a slight advantage over competing cuisines thanks to the attractive returns available for their product.
'Margins in pizza are really good. That is a statement of fact,' says James Elliot, co-founder of Pizza Pilgrims.
So much so that he claims Pizza Pilgrims has not had to compromise on quality despite the rising cost of ingredients, fuel and labour.
'In 14 years, we've never had to make a call and try and compromise,' he says. 'I was just in Naples last week and we made a decision this year to switch our tomatoes to a specific kind of San Marzano tomatoes, which cost the business about £100,000.'
That is not to say that pizza is immune to inflation. 'Everybody has taken pricing or put prices up, but we haven't put them up as much as other people,' says MacKenzie.
But with the price of a 12-inch pizza usually coming in below the £15 mark, 'it's still an attractive proposition at a time when everything's becoming more expensive', says Stenning.
'When you look at the cost of ingredients like beef, the cost of that has risen so dramatically. When you have something like pizza, where protein is low down on the list of ingredients, you've got scope to play,' he says.
At Vincenzo's, 12-inch pizzas cost between £11 and £13, while his 18-inch pizzas cost from £19 to £23.
'Margins were very, very good during lockdown but everything's doubled in price since then,' adds Vincent, who sold pizzas through a hatch during the pandemic before going on to open his restaurant.
'Mozzarella, pizza boxes and tomatoes have all doubled in price. Some things have tripled. Margins are certainly not as good as they were, but they're still good.'
Barney Howard, who runs Barney & The Pizza in Folkestone Harbour, Kent, alongside a sandwich company, says: 'Comparing it to the sandwich company where margins are awful, pizza is a lot better.'
However, he adds, 'You can still make a loss-making pizza. Just because your food costs are low, because it is, it is still very, very tough to make money.'
MacKenzie says demand for pizza has also kept up thanks to its broad appeal. 'At the end of the day, it is dough, passata, cheese, toppings, in an oven,' she says.
According to Alley Cats' De Luca, the explanation for how pizza conquered Britain is equally as simple.
'We see pizza as a staple that everybody can relate to. It doesn't matter where you find yourself in the world, or what cuisine you like or don't like, pizza seems to be a common denominator.'
Elliot agrees: 'If you're booking dinner for you and your six mates, pizza is always a pretty safe bet.
'It is such a democratic food. For £15, you can go and get the best pizza in the city. I can't then give you another £15 and you can go and get a pizza that's twice as good.'