Divisions of England, then and now
In 1966 I went to study in England, and spent two and a half years there. It took me about a year to get over the culture shock, and to appreciate different aspects of English culture — or rather English cultures, for there are several regional cultures.
Forty years later I visited England again, on holiday this time, and revisited some of the places I had known, and explored some new ones. I found that there were many changes, some expected, some unexpected. I’ve described that, and some of the changes I noticed here.
Then someone posted this graphic, which illustrated some of the changes I had noticed, and some that I hadn’t.
The most startling change to me is the one on chips.
Back in 1966 the area marked above as “gravy on chips” was definitely salt and vinegar. I never, ever saw anyone have gravy on chips.
Whether bought from Sarah’s or Sweaty Betty’s, it was only ever salt and vinegar.
And in the area marked on the map as “salt and vinegar”, chips were unheard of. No matter where I went in London (and I went to most places on my London Transport free pass), there were no chips, only “French Fried Potatoes”. Chips were strictly north of the Trent.
The area marked “curry sauce on chips” was unknown territory for me, so I can’t comment on that.
So what happened? Did “French fried potatoes” go out with the bowler hats?
The bit about Greggs, I don’t understand much, but when we visited Cornwall in 2005, pasties were as scarce as chips in London in 1966. We asked at several places, and they sent us somewhere else, until we eventually foudn them at the 6th place we tried. And everyone in Bodmin spoke with Estuary accents.
The most astounding thing of all, however, is the beer.
Before starting my studies in Durham I worked as a bus driver in London for 6 months. After a union meeting, which was held in a pub (the Telegraph on Brixton Hill), I was accosted by a conductor, who wanted to know about the big buses in Johannesburg that I had talked of at the meeting. Then I bought him a drink and he told me he was the king of Streatham, and offered to take me on a tour of London and a trip to Brighton. He had been in many jobs before he became a conductor — street sweeper, rider on the wall of death, barrow boy. He had been in the cooler once for three months for scaling a motorbike. He bought me a drink. Then we went round the corner to another pub, his favourite hang-out, it appeared.
There we pooled our meagre resources and bought another drink. He scorned me for drinking cider, and said I should drink bitter. I said that draft bitter was usually flat. He said that didn’t matter, it was the taste that counts. The English like their beer warm and flat. I can think of nothing more insipid or puke-provoking. Then John starts waving and beckoning to his friend Reg, who is over at the other bar opposite. Reg, he tells me, is a tit-tat man. What the hell is a tit-tat man? Well, he’s the chap at the races who stands at one end and waggles his fingers and the bookies then know what every horse is doing. Reg is one of the best tit-tat men there is. Reg comes round and joins us. I like Reg. John introduces me as Steve, and Reg called me “Stephen”, so I called him “Reginald”, which provoked much giggling. Then he tried to guess my age, and said I was 32. Then changed it to 27 (I was actually 25). He said I’d never guess his age to within five years. So I said he was 57. No, he’s 56. He seemed rather amazed. He talked a little more. Then I said goodbye to John and Reg, and slipped away quietly, leaving them talking in a very lively way to someone else. The closing bell had rung, and I came home.
That was London, the area shown on the map as “craft ale”. Does bitter count as craft ale? There was bottled ale, but that was too fizzy. So English beer was either too flat or too fizzy. Nothing in between. Then I went north to Durham and discovered Newcastle Brown Ale. Now that was beer, the best in the world, I thought. Lion Ale, the beer Natal made famous, came a rather poor second, but still way better than bitter, or lager. And in Durham no one had ever heard of lager, except perhaps a few people who had gone to Germany on holiday.
So when did ale move south and lager move north? Was that yet another thing wrought by Margaret Thatcher?
Notes from underground 
Chips = French fried potatoes.
Crisps = what is known as “chips” in South Africa.
Well yes, but what I would like to know is when Londoners stopped calling chips “French Fried Potatoes” and started having them with salt and vinegar? And when people north of the Trent stopped having them with salt and vinegar and started having them with gravy.
In South Africa if we want to distinguish them from crisps we call them “slap chips”, but we never, like the Londoners, called them “French Fried Potatoes”.
I assumed that chips have always been chips (at least since “fish and chips” was concocted by fusing Jewish fried fish and Huguenot fried potatoes in the East End of London in the 1800s). I’ve never heard of “French fried potatoes.
Regarding the Bodmin accent:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices/021M-C1190X0010XX-0101V0
It was part of the culture shock when I arrived in England in 1966. I had assumed that fish & chips was a characteristically English dish. But every restaurant I went to in London had “French Fried Potatoes” on the menu. Maybe it was a purely 60s thing, and chips (with salt & vinegar) were available north of the Trent, but in London, no.