25-07-2025
The scourge of London's chicken shops
It was recently announced that the sign from the original Morley's chicken shop is to go on display in the new London Museum in honour of the chain's 40th anniversary. Morley's, which has more than 100 branches, almost all in south London, has become something of an institution. Even Mayor Sadiq Khan has declared himself a Morley's man.
The idea that Morley's is museum-worthy London heritage seems a stretch, though. Fried chicken is meant to be the prized food of Kentucky or Korea, not Kennington or Kingsbury. But I paid a visit to my nearest Morley's to see what the fuss was about.
I opted for the famed spicy wings and referred – as is obligatory – to the server as 'Bossman'. Past the counter I could see men at the fryers, their faces shining and not with happiness. There was a vague smell of BO – though unclear whether emanating from one of the chefs (is that the right word?) or my lunch.
But, in truth, Morley's isn't the worst of these places. 'Mmm… It Tastes Better' reads their tagline. And if they mean better than Chicken Cottage, they may have a point. The ketchup even comes in proper round little tubs and not those fiddly sachets providing sauce enough for precisely three fries. (The sharp-edged rectangular plastic tubs are all but banished from the modern-day chicken shop, presumably in case they could be used as a murder weapon.)
When hungry or hungover, if you can look past the unidentifiable black stringy bits, Morley's serves a purpose. But there's no getting around the fact that what these chicken shops serve up is lowest common denominator food. If the Big Mac is the American century in edible form, the chicken wing somehow represents globalisation's greasy underbelly. There is still something a tiny bit optimistic about McDonald's – the Happy Meal, the clown smile, the golden arches promising a bite of the capitalist dream. There is nothing redeeming about the chicken slop. Ronald wouldn't be so much as turning in his grave as bent over his tombstone in his happy yellow jumpsuit, retching.
And leaving taste aside, the bigger problem is the blight on the high street. Chicken shops are everywhere – there are, extraordinarily, 8,000 in London alone (including 29 on a single stretch of road in Streatham). That compares with 10,500 fish and chip shops across the entire UK, down from a peak of more than 35,000 in the 1930s. The problem with chicken shops is the garish signage, the smell of oil last changed at some point in the 2010s. There's the crime (in 2019, the Youth Select Committee heard evidence that 'chicken shop gangs' were recruiting children to their drug operations with the offer of free chicken), the crowds, the loafing, loutishness and litter.
Above all, the litter. More than any of the big-name fast-food chains, chicken shops seem to disgorge boxes, buckets and bones on every street that they plague. Keep Britain Tidy does good stuff ('Don't be a tosser' was a favourite). But the charity's campaign to combat the blight of cigarette butts feels stuck in the wrong decade. We need rather a national effort against chicken skeletons. I once followed bones all the way down Blackstock Road from chicken shop to Tube station, like Hansel and Gretel. The trail ended, fittingly, with three undevoured wings strewn across the floor. After all, it's hard to keep it all in the bucket when jumping the ticket barriers.
Fried chicken has become recently rather chic. Gen Z tune into Chicken Shop Date on YouTube and London has gentrified with upmarket joints – Popeyes, Butchies, Lucky's. At another, Thunderbird Fried Chicken, at Embankment, I paid £17.74 for eight wings with fries and a milkshake. Not that those prices make it free-range, mind – though at least it's halal so you know the battery bird has suffered.
Writing in the Times, Charlotte Ivers recently hailed the chicken wing as a 'quintessentially British success story' and 'one of the victors of multiculturalism', as she salivated over the offering at Wingmans on Kilburn High Road. 'What a blessing,' she sighed. I'm sorry but this is tosh. This is not some sort of authentic ethnic dish like Caribbean jerk chicken (and very nice that is too). No culture would be proud of the junk that comes out of these shops or want its cuisine to be judged on this basis. This is Theresa May's 'citizen of nowhere' encased in batter. But we have allowed ourselves to be browbeaten into accepting the fiction that these places are serving up some sort of ethnic delicacy, a nostalgic right for diaspora groups. A quote from Vice magazine is emblazoned across the wall at Morley's: 'Seeing a Morley's lets me know that I'm home.' How have we let it happen that fried chicken, something with no connection to the UK, or for that matter with the ancestral homes of our diaspora groups, is now synonymous with London?
This is a difficult area. I have no desire to control what people eat though force of law. But it is no surprise that with some 40 chicken shops for every secondary school in Tower Hamlets, the borough has the sixth-highest rate of child obesity in the UK. Won't someone think of the children.
Of course these places will continue to exist. But the chicken shops' merciless spread like some sort of cooking oil slick is something we should resist. Fewer of them would be a public good. Please, Bossman.
