Cow-keepers and confectioners on Regent's Park Road
Primrose Hill's shopping street began as a short parade serving a brand-new suburb. Local shop histories record that the first shops listed here, in 1855, stood between what are now numbers 51 and 73 Regent's Park Road, and that they were a confectioner, a grocer, a stationer, a cow-keeper, a fruiterer and a tobacconist.
It is a revealing list. Four of the six sold food, and one of them tells you most about Victorian shopping habits: the cow-keeper kept animals in the middle of the city because, before refrigeration and fast rail freight, that was the only reliable way to get fresh milk to a household. As the terraces filled, the parade thickened. Regent's Park Road eventually carried the largest concentration of shops in the neighbourhood, somewhere in the region of fifty, with the usual mix of dairies, bakers, butchers, greengrocers and general provision dealers. What it did not have, and would not have for a very long time, was a delicatessen in anything like the sense we now mean.
Rationing, olive oil and the trip to Soho
The change came from outside the neighbourhood. Elizabeth David's first book on Mediterranean cooking appeared in 1950, while Britain was still rationed; rationing did not finally end until the summer of 1954. David herself described the practical problem her readers faced. Buying olive oil, or Parmesan in the piece rather than in a drum of powder, meant a bus journey to the Italian provision shops of Soho and a heavy bag on the way home.
Within a decade or so that had begun to change, as provision shops and the newer supermarkets started stocking imported produce. The ingredients that had required a special expedition were becoming things a local shop might reasonably carry, and the ground was prepared for a different kind of food retailing in neighbourhoods like this one.
Shepherd Foods, Sesame and the brown-food years
Two Primrose Hill shops mark that shift. Shepherd Foods was established in 1968 and still trades from 59 to 61 Regent's Park Road, a family-run business that took its name from the founding family's surname and shares ownership with the Partridges stores in south-west London. It occupies the middle ground between a grocer and a delicatessen: wine, a hot counter, cheese, fruit and vegetables, and the sort of range that once required a trip into town.
A few doors along the road, at number 128, Sesame opened in 1971. It was started by three health-food enthusiasts and run from 1983 by Peter Haxton. Regulars remembered it as the shop where everything was brown: brown rice, brown bread, brown sugar, and, for years, the only source for miles of nuts, dried fruit, couscous and wholewheat flour. Sesame closed in November 2012 after four decades. Its owner told the local press that shopping habits had changed and the competition had become impossible, which is a neat description of what had actually happened. The wholefood shop had won its argument so thoroughly that supermarkets and health-food chains had taken over its entire range.
Counters, kitchens and the modern grocer
The street itself helped. Traffic through the shopping stretch was cut when the Chalk Farm railway bridge was pedestrianised in 1972, and from the 1960s onwards the neighbourhood's gentrification steadily raised what local shops could charge and what they could specialise in.
The most visible modern arrival is Melrose and Morgan, whose first shop opened on Gloucester Avenue in November 2004, with a second in Hampstead in 2010. Its pitch was not scarcity but provenance and cooking: British produce, named suppliers, and food prepared in the company's own kitchen rather than bought in. That is the shape most successful delicatessens have taken since supermarkets absorbed the imported-ingredient trade.
Since 2020 the neighbourhood has also had a weekly food market on Elsworthy Road, held on Saturday mornings and run as a community interest company owned by the traders themselves.
What the delicatessen revolution actually changed
Read across a century and a half, the pattern is not a straight line from plain food to fancy food. It is a repeated cycle. A shop introduces something unfamiliar; the unfamiliar becomes normal; the supermarket takes it; and the specialist shop either closes or moves on to whatever is unfamiliar next. The cow-keeper lost to the dairy, the dairy to the supermarket, the wholefood shop to the supermarket's own wholefood aisle. What has survived on Regent's Park Road is a high street still dominated by independents rather than chains, which in central London is now the genuinely unusual thing about it.