By Sally Prosser

Pizza is popular the world over and, unsurprisingly, ingrained into food culture in the UK.  In most larger towns and cities, people have a wide choice of pizza places to eat-in, take-away, or, more recently, order them for home delivery. 

The first chain of pizza restaurants here was Pizza Express, with the first branch being opened in Wardour Street, London in 1965 by Peter Boizot, growing to over 300. Peter was a Brit who wanted to bring the traditional Italian-style pizza that he’d tasted while visiting the country to his fellow compatriots. However, in the decades that have followed, American chains have infiltrated our high streets. The top retailer is takeaway-giant Dominos which sells more than 110 million pizzas in a year. A recent documentary revealed that their staff didn’t know how the pizza bases were made and what the ‘secret ingredient’ is, with a lot of the making process done by robots. These chains often serve a different, thicker style of pizza, with a huge variety of toppings and stuffed crusts - definitely far away from that recognised in Naples where pizza first originated.

It’s also is a long way from Peter Boizot who shipped an authentic pizza oven from Naples and sold his first pizzas on pieces of greaseproof paper through the front window of Pizza Express.

In 2015, when I lived in the UAE, the Abu Dhabi authorities shipped ten food trucks from the UK for a street food festival so that eaters could sample ‘the latest food trend from the West’. There I met Thom and James Elliot of Pizza Pilgrims who were baking pizzas at a very high heat in an Italian stone oven installed in an absolutely tiny 3-wheeled Piaggio Ape van. The dough for their pizzas was handmade and proved for at least 24 hours. In 2011, the brothers had been surprised at the lack of pizza vans in the burgeoning street food scene so they bought their van in Italy and went on a ‘Pizza Pilgrimage’ around the country to learn as much as they could about cooking methods and ingredients.

These days, if you Google ‘pizza vans’ you’re likely to find a mobile wood-fired service near you at some time of the month. Perhaps the Pizza Pilgrim’s success tapped into a move away from mass produced and standardised food to something handmade, more authentic and artisanal. This combined with the demand for pizza even in the most remote parts of the UK fuelled the change to a new direction.

The big chains haven’t gone away, but Italian-style, traditional, wood-fired, seasonal, handmade or hand-stretched are all terms that are used regularly on the menus of well-established and in a new phase of pizza restaurants to emerge. This includes Pizza Pilgrims, by the way, who now have over 20 franchise restaurants and a pizza-by-post business.

The evolution continues with trends in 2023 predicted to include rectangular shapes, pizza wraps, gluten-free bases, sourdough, pickles and plant-based or unusual toppings; mac n cheese, smoked halloumi, sauerkraut, crab thermidor or deconstructed, fried tiramisu anyone?

There are pop-ups themed to TV series, takeaways from village pubs, community pizza ovens and restaurants in fields on remote farms. As pizza was named the most popular takeaway in the UK in 2022, with almost one in five Brits choosing it as their favourite food to take home, this story of this round baked dough’s journey through through British menus, food culture and eating habits continues to be a fascinating follow.