Why Greggs is better than Pret (and other legends of the North-South Divide)

Getting the finance, infrastructure and social environment that allows more John Greggs to thrive should be the priority

Seb Paine, once of the Financial Times and now at think tank Onward, popped up on Times Radio with a bizarre comment about fast food outlets Pret-a-Manger and Greggs and how opting for one or the other says something about your politics. Payne talks about his home town of Newcastle (including the 24-hour Greggs in the Bigg Market) which famously has more Greggs than anywhere while the only Pret had to close. Greggs is, of course, a Newcastle company and represents the North-East’s finest export since they stopped digging coal and making ships.

Greggs is, in almost every respect, better than Pret and this is entirely about pastry. If you don’t like hot, savoury pastries then Greggs probably isn’t for you. My wife worked for a newspaper in Manchester (now sadly departed) and had an American colleague who was, I’m not being unkind here, the sort of size you’d expect from an American colleague. This man was absolutely in love with Greggs because (and this might surprise you all) the USA doesn’t do fast food savoury pastries unless you count the baby pasties they call empanadas. After the business closed and he was headed back to the States, his final trip was to Greggs so as to savour its wonders for one last time. Nobody would do that for Pret.

Today, with nearly 2,500 outlets in the UK, Greggs is more an national institution than a Northern institution but it was still true six years ago that you could trace the essential North-South divide by looking at the distribution of the company’s stores. But if you want to look at that legendary divide then the distribution of Pret outlets is a guide to whare all the guilty rich live. Currently Pret-a-Manger has four locations in Yorkshire - Leeds, Harrogate, Boston Spa and Knottingley Service Station. Greggs, on the other hand, has three locations in Keighley alone.

The North-South divide is one of those things that manages to be both real and a media fantasy at the same time. Pret started out with a store on Victoria Street (the founders having bought the brand from a defunct business in Hampstead) and its product range, image and market positioning reflect its chosen demographic of well-healed, young urban workers. Pret was created deliberately for this purpose, it was conscious marketing-driven choices that determined the store’s name, the product range, the styling and the selection of locations. This doesn’t make the product poor or the business cynical but it tells a very different story to Greggs.

Greggs, at least according to its website, began (once John Gregg had stopped selling eggs from a bicycle) as a high street bakers in Gosforth. Now I’m sure John Gregg chose Gosforth as least partly because it is one of Newcastle’s better suburbs but his business wasn’t developed as a brand in the way of Pret-a-Manger. Greggs was created deliberately but as a place to bake and sell bread and pastries not as a reflection of the target demographic’s style and aspiration. There is nothing posh about a high street bakers (or there wasn’t about such shops 80 years ago when John Gregg started) but equally there’s no sense of a bakers being common or down-market. Yet because Greggs became a massive business selling sausage rolls and chicken bakes to people in the North and Midlands, it became (at least in the minds of the London media) symbolic of English working-class fast food.

Some of this media attention treated Greggs as a sort of exotic cuisine that you needed to go to Oldham or Sunderland to experience. A bit like my wife’s American colleague, media people would occasionally (and briefly) leave London for ‘up north’ and there find wonderful pastries sold at rock-bottom prices. For some of these guilty rich people, the existence of Greggs is an explanation as to why everyone north of Milton Keynes is fat and ill, whereas others saw the business as great but ‘it wouldn’t work in London’. I’m not going to comment on the first part of these visitors’ presumptions but Greggs has definitely shown that they can sell sausage rolls and steak bakes in London, even if London’s bosses won’t let them open 24-hours a day in Leicester Square.

In some respects these stories do tell us about the nature of that North-South divide. Or more accurately the difference between London, places that think they are London, and the rest of England. The London attitude to the rest of England is very much like Pret - create, design and position a brand concept then apply it to ‘levelling up’, ‘regeneration’ or ‘narrowing the gap’. The latest Centre for Cities work on local government funding captures this approach perfectly:

“..the Government should form a single pot, by bringing together the various grants issued to local government for economic development, without ring-fencing between policy areas. This means they will have to assess grants currently issued to local government, determine if their purpose is economic development, and if so, roll them into the single pot.”

The amount of money for economic development, the overall strategy for this work and the priorities for its distribution are set by experts in London with big sub-regional authorities then managing the finer detail of this money and actual local councils simply being delivery agents on the ground. It is always clear that London-based experts simply don’t believe that places outside the great metropolis (and one or two high status satellites) have the gumption to create, fund and manage regeneration programmes let alone long-term economic development.

A more radical approach would start with breakfast at Greggs in one of those northern towns. Driving away after that satisfying breakfast, people would see the legacy of what the North did when it was able to plan, fund and execute development projects without much need to get ministerial approval from London. Magnificent civic buildings, bridges, railway stations, reservoirs, dams, museums, parks and roads. This is the Greggs approach that isn’t determmined by some grand brand strategy but rather by what needs to be done.

So long as the economic development of the North is controlled by men from London, the North won’t get any economic development worth the name. This isn’t an advert for local government, too much of it is run by the second rate, but it is true. I don’t think, for example, that Leeds needs a tram system but I am sure that had the city fathers of Leeds been free of central government funding shackles (like their sister cities in Europe and the USA), the city would have funded and built some kind of mass transit network.

Britain has had 50 years or more of the ‘Pret-a-Manger’ approach to regional development and regeneration and it is hard to see quite where this has worked other than at Canary Wharf (which is, after all, in London). We have spent billions on a variety of high profile, Whitehall-designed, strategies for urban regenaration. I could take you to a dozen places within twenty miles of where I live that have benefitted from this genius. You would be hard pushed to point to the benefits from that money in Keighley or Manningham, Harehills or Werneth, West Bowling or Richmond Hill. It isn’t that nothing was done with all that money but rather that the carefully designed, PR-friendly strategies of successive national governments have simply failed to make a difference.

Yet we persist, as the Centre for Cities work shows, with the idea that economic development funding requires central direction and a national strategy, that local government is a mere agent intended to sell Whitehall’s desires to sceptical northerners while managing (often badly) the implementation of projects and programmes of regeneration. These schemes attract a veritable hive of grant farmers, from national NGOs and development businesses down to local ‘third sector’ operations living off the project money regneration schemes provide.

England’s North-South divide, to a large extent, exists in people’s minds. People either want there to be a huge cultural gulf between Battersea and Bolton (reinforced by a host of stereotypes) or else want to preserve northern struggle as a vehicle for plays, films and poverty tour journalism. In truth there really isn’t any cutural gulf (beyond vowel pronounciation and what we call a bread roll) and so long as you can take the joke about how there is only one ‘r’ in grass and recognise mushy peas when you see them, everything is fine. And most of the north isn’t struggling, it just needs a bit more oomph.

What matters is that we learn the lesson (and don’t sneer at) the North’s successes. Greggs is one of those successes and it comes from a long line of other successful northerners who didn’t just run mills, shipyards or collieries. Ken Morrison, Michael Marks, John Timpson, the Rayner brothers and hundreds of others who founded successful businesses just like John Gregg did in Gosforth, represent the reality of the north far more than do the endless sob-stories beloved of the London media. Liking Greggs isn’t about any kind of political, class or cultural divide but is about liking something - baked savoury pastries - that have been a staple of the high streets of England for hundreds of years. And the lesson from this company is that you can, and lots of people do, build a successful business in the north of England. Getting the finance, infrastructure and social environment that allows more John Greggs to thrive should be the priority. And the best place to start is by giving cities and towns back the autonomy successive Westminster governments took away.