So you want to do a bakery crawl?

Paul Hollywood has nothing on me

If you had asked me how I was going to spend my last day of being 28, I wouldn’t have guessed trying all of Manchester’s bakeries. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t have guessed anything, because turning 29 is not culturally significant in the same way as other birthdays, but still. Here I was, sitting around the table, one year and one day from thirty, about to eat perhaps the most pastries I had ever attempted in my life.

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So you want to do a bakery crawl?

It occurred to me almost six months prior. I was browsing Instagram instead of doing anything worthwhile with my time, when I stumbled onto the classic social media ouroboros, a Twitter screenshot on someone’s Instagram stories:

Of course, it immediately gripped me. Not for the cannibalising nature of internet content, but the actual concept of a bakery crawl. In the last two years, desperate to fulfil my dreams of being the kind of beautiful leftie manic pixie dream girl who brings gorgeous rustic loaves home and actually invests in local businesses, I have become increasingly aware of Manchester’s independent bakeries. 

These days most people get their baked goods from their local supermarket. Growing up in Cornwall, the bakeries that did exist were primarily the place to get your pasties from, and maybe a gingerbread man if you were good. Perhaps the most ubiquitous UK bakery is Greggs, which was founded in 1939; they used to sell bread and scones until 2013, when they switched solely to “food on the go” because they couldn’t compete with supermarkets. But most supermarkets have been around less than 100 years, while baking has been part of the UK’s culinary DNA for an incredibly long time. 

According to Diane Purkiss’s English Food: A People’s History, the oldest bread found in Britain was found in Yarnton near Oxford, and is estimated to be over 5000 years old. The two lumps were completely burnt, which may have been as some form of sacrifice, or perhaps the genetic origin of leaving the toast too long. However, these charred lumps were closer to flatbreads, and it wasn’t until the Romans trying to recreate their beloved wheaten bread in our damp lands did we start to get bread a bit closer to your loaf of Hovis. It took a while to get things going, the Anglo-Saxon words for lord and lady translating literally to loafkeep and loaf-kneader, with bread ovens being owned by lords and rented out to their tenants for use at home during this period. But after a while, it wasn’t feasible for housewives to be shelling out to rent the ovens and also make all the bread themselves, when they could just buy ready-made bread from someone else. At this point, baking as a profession flourished, despite even burning London down at one point, and remained largely unchanged until the reign of James I, when bakers starting selling sweet treats and cakes alongside your basic loaves of bread. Bakeries were staples of the community, in the same way grocers and butchers once were.

Of course, we’re a long way away from those times, but it’s clear we are seeing some sort of bakery renaissance. Perhaps after the sourdough craze of the pandemic, people appreciate those who can actually make bread as a living. Social media is full of the latest croissant-based Frankenstein hit (cruffin? croughnut? crasagne? who knows?), and as well as the increasing expansion of bakery/cafe chain Gail’s and the hit indie bakery Toad Bakery in Camberwell. And over the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more artisan bakeries popping up in Manchester; when the bakery crawl meme appeared, it felt like the culmination of this revived industry. Wouldn’t this be an efficient way to try them all?

So what follows is my honest account of how my attempt at a Bakery Crawl went down, along with any pointers for those of you wanting to embark on your own bakery adventure.

When?