Why your local butcher's has had a hip makeover

Times

a day ago

Charlie Smith and Sweyn Hall opened Henwen's, their butcher's shop in Forest Hill, southeast London, on October 30 last year. It was close to the festival of Samhain, which to any British folk revivalist is a high point in the Celtic pagan calendar. The date was an auspicious one for the pair. 'We use herbs and products that have meaning to them, based in folklore and myth. We wanted everything to be delicious and unique to us. Our sausages are just salt, pepper, aniseed and mince.'
Their shop is an example of a new wave of butchers who provide exceptional meat, service and skills steeped in a creative spirit. Smith, for example studied critical fine art Practice at Brighton University, and Hall product design at Central Saint Martins before working in restaurant kitchens, where he was known for his precision and technical skills with spicing, fermenting and charcuterie.
For any self-respecting gentrifying neighbourhood, a hip butcher's is a must, like a decent coffee shop or a bakery selling proper sourdough. There's Littlewoods, famous for its incredible yellow fat (sign of happy cows with an ideal wild diet), in Stockport, a town known lately as the Berlin of the north; Lizzy Douglas's Black Pig in Deal; Northdown in Margate; Flock + Herd in Peckham; and Stella's in Newington Green, north London, which has a listening bar every Friday night.
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Smith had to choose between butchery and being a conceptual artist. 'I was fascinated by abattoirs and carcasses as an artist,' he says. 'But you soon find out that the lot of a butcher is not simply the large chunks of meat and big knives of primal butchery. It's cleaning, curing bacon, it's meatballs and sausages and meaningful daily interactions with customers about food. In Europe there is a tradition of studying hospitality. Here, there are fewer rules, more space for creativity.'
Slop, a magazine about all types of produce, has long-read interviews that treats these butchers like the rock stars they have become. The latest issue's cover star is a cow belonging to the Hereford-based farmer turned butcher Tom Jones. Slop's editor, Nicholas Payne-Baaden, spent ten years as a butcher himself: 'But I worked with great ones, incredibly talented people, and I knew I would never be that.' Butchery sits alongside traditional lifestyle and fashion content in Slop. 'The person who wants good charcuterie is also likely to want a £150 chore jacket. It's a more natural fit than you think.'
The portfolio career is a defining and oft-mocked characteristic of the contemporary hipster class. But the blurring of the edges between creative disciplines and the savvy of the self-promoting entrepreneur has revived many British traditions that were somewhat stuck. Butchery is no exception.
Henwen, for instance, has a range of cool merch including T-shirts and also sells — what else — natural wine. As is mandatory for any hipster food outlet, queues form down the street for its cult product: a pork pie. 'Hand-raised — we make it from scratch in-house including the lard, jelly and the pastry.'
The roots of the hip butcher can be traced back to the game-changing Ginger Pig in Marylebone, which opened in 2003. Baaden-Payne says most of the new generation of butchers can trace their skills back to working for someone who had worked there. Other influential Noughties London butcher's shops include The Butchery and Turner & George, which brought butchers back to the nose-to-tail ethos of old, championed by the chef Fergus Henderson at St John.
Another undeniable influence is the British meat revival that sprang from the farming community opening farm shops, including some very high profile and grand ones. The Chatsworth Estate was first, then the Windsor Estate Farm Shop, and Lady Bamford's organic brand, named after her Cotswolds estate, Daylesford.
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After three decades working across the royal household, estates and farm shops, the master butcher Christopher Murray left to work with the contemporary art gallery Hauser + Wirth, which owns farm shops in Mayfair and Somerset. 'What Hauser + Wirth and the royal household have is the Rolls-Royce of butchery, and that's access to the space to butcher an entire carcass of meat and dry-age it for 28 days,' he says. Murray is thrilled by these new-wave butchers and their eccentric approach to cuts including regional British variations, American, French and Japanese. 'I love it when someone asks me for a cut I've never heard of.'
The era of meat'n'two veg is dying out. Today's twenty and thirtysomethings are more akin to plant-leaning omnivores with an 'eat less but better' approach to meat consumption, a bit like the 'drink less but better' approach to alcohol. 'Wellness has its role to play in this butchery revival,' says Danny Kingston, recipe developer at Turner & George. 'We've just launched a keto/carnivore box. We were responding to customers who were asking more and more about cuts with the high fat content required for ketogenic diets, and wanting to know the difference between dripping, tallow and suet, or the best bones to make broths [stock, basically, but cooked much longer] and gelatine. We see men, especially, geeking out over the American barbecue cuts: short ribs, deckle, flat iron, tri-tip, picanha and, of course, brisket. We call them the 'brisket bros'.'
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Inevitably, this new style of butchery will be widely copied. Already there are short ribs for sale in Lidl. But many express their concerns about the 13,000 tonnes of cheap beef included in Starmer's trade deal with Trump. 'Some of the best meat in the world comes from Britain,' Murray says. 'My advice is to keep it British.'
Smith says he knows he did the right thing choosing butchery over art. 'It's hard work but it's fun, and I'm still creative, sharing good ideas even when I'm selling two sausages to a little old lady. This work is worthwhile.'