“What’s London like?” the folks at home often ask me, and I tell them, “the streets are lined with thousands of cheap-arse fried chicken shops.” I’ve been meaning to take photos of them (that and off-licenses), but they’re so numerous the project has always seemed too daunting. It’s like embarking on an ocean cruise with a mission to photograph the horizon.
Luckily, someone has done the hard work for me: Bad Gas has a gallery of fried chicken shops, 122 of them so far. Some of them come from further afield than, say, Walthamstow, but they are all so much of a piece that clicking through a couple of dozen of them gives a much more vivid sense of walking London’s streets than watching The Bill could ever achieve.
The curators have helpfully added the rules for making a successful chicken shop sign, along with more detailed observations which experience qualifies me to vouch for.
If you call your shop Kennedy Fried Chicken, there’s a law stating that you must display a picture of the Statue of Liberty.
Enjoy your virtual holiday in the Empire’s capital, and keep an eye out for the line-dancing rooster.
badgas.co.uk appears to be offline, but after seeing a Vermont Southern Fried Chicken recently, I SO want to produce a map of the US made up of corresponding shop fronts from this wonderful city. Is there a North Dakota Fried Chicken, I can only assume that the laws of probability and the lack of basic knowledge of US geography and food hygiene means there must be one somewhere. Streatham, at a rough guess.