Second World War-style restaurants to help feed underprivileged families

Telegraph

08-07-2025

Second World War-style restaurants will serve meals for as little as £3 to provide healthy meals to underprivileged areas.
A taxpayer-funded project will launch a restaurant in Nottingham and another in Dundee offering cheap and nutritious meals to people in disadvantaged areas.
The two not-for-profit sites will resemble the British and civic kitchens of the 1940s when Britons who had their homes bombed went to communal spaces to eat hearty meals.
The new incarnation of these subsidised cafes will focus on feeding children and operate as a normal restaurant for at least five days a week. The cost of a meal will only marginally exceed that of the ingredients.
More than £1.5 million of taxpayer money is funding the 12-month pilot project, which rekindles the Blitz spirit in an effort to combat food poverty and malnutrition.
In the early 1940s, a meal at a subsidised communal kitchen would include a cup of tea costing one pence, and bangers and mash at about sixpence.
'The meals are expected to cost between £3 and £5,' Anna Chworow, the deputy director of Nourish Scotland, which is running the study alongside the University of Sussex, said of the expected menu at the modern civic kitchens.
'From the customer end, this will feel like an ordinary restaurant – albeit with low prices.
'The subsidy mostly supports staff costs and overheads, and this in turn keeps the prices low for everyone. Each meal is priced slightly above the cost of ingredients used to make it, meaning the more popular the restaurants are, the more economically viable they become,' she added.
There are currently no government-subsidised restaurants in the UK, with the war-era eateries falling out of favour after rationing ended in 1954. Most closed by the 1960s.
Some countries such as Poland and Turkey have similar schemes, but the pilot sites in Nottingham and Dundee will be unique in 21st-century Britain.
The scientists running the scheme hope the pilot will provide a blueprint for more restaurants to open in the coming years, which will be funded by local authorities.
The exact restaurant locations, cuisine, meals and pricing will be decided in talks with the local community.
How the food will be sourced remains unknown, with local produce a priority for the researchers. A contract to run the project is expected to be tendered later this year.
'The project team hopes that the local authorities and the national governments (at the UK and devolved level) would be interested in continuing the two sites after the pilot is over and in rolling them out more widely,' Ms Chworow said.
'The model is for the funding to be given to the operator of the restaurant – in the case of the pilots, it will be the caterer. In the future, we would imagine the local authority receiving funding from the central government.
'It's important to say these two restaurants will be test sites – so may operate slightly differently from how we envisage the eventual roll-out. The important things we're trying to learn are the operations (including the exact financial model) and the impact they have on health and wellbeing.'
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has announced more than £8 million in total funding for six different projects, with one being the subsidised restaurants. Another includes a mobile greengrocer, dubbed the Queen of Greens, visiting areas of Liverpool where social housing residents have limited access to fresh, nutritious food.
Peter Kyle, the Science and Technology Secretary, said: 'No one in this country should be left unable to access the healthy food they need.
'These projects will draw on the power of research to actively explore the best ways to get healthy food into the mouths of those who need it, potentially having a transformational effect on people's lives, and fulfilling the missions set in our Plan for Change.'