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On a recent morning in Walthamstow, east London, business was brisk in the new Gail’s bakery on Orford Road. The red tables and yellow chairs outside were taken by young parents with babies in UPPAbaby and Joolz buggies and there was a line for coffee, croissants, chocolate babkas and sourdough loaves.
“I usually go to the café down the road. I feel like I’m betraying them coming here, but I just couldn’t help myself,” confessed Mona Sethi, a community nurse who had dropped by. She was not alone: it was only the café’s second day open, having braved a fierce petition against its arrival, but it was packed.
The rise of Gail’s, a bakery chain that has about 150 branches and is expanding across the UK from London and the south-east, has become a cause célèbre in the UK high street. Is it bringing ethical, artisanal bread and pastries to a wider audience, or squeezing out localism with economies of scale?
The protest in Walthamstow, which has gentrified rapidly as young professionals have been pushed out from Islington and Hackney by rising property prices, emphasised the latter. It denounced the potential for Gail’s to “dismantle the character and diversity crucial to Walthamstow’s charm”.
The economic tide is clearly turning on Orford Road, a partly pedestrianised stretch of restaurants and shops at the heart of what is known as Walthamstow Village. A tapas bar has shut and Sam Davis, who has run the Village Bakery close to the new Gail’s for 19 years, is selling her lease to buy a camper van and go travelling.
“Bread has always been a marker of class, taste and distinction,” says Emma Bell, an Open University professor who has studied the recent growth of artisanal and craft bakeries. Many are tiny: she found that nearly half are “micro bakeries” run by one or two people, often from home. But they have sprung up in many towns and cities.
Gail’s started out small. “We did not think we would have more than five cafés. That sounded like it would be an incredible achievement,” says Tom Molnar, its chief executive. It was not originally a retail chain: it was created as a wholesale bakery called the Bread Factory supplying baked goods for high-end London restaurants in the 1990s.
Molnar joined in 2003 and the first Gail’s café, named after Bread Factory’s co-founder Gail Mejia, opened in Hampstead in 2005. Risk Capital Partners, a private equity fund co-led by the retail entrepreneur Luke Johnson, bought out Mejia and invested in the chain’s growth in 2011 (Johnson also invested in, and was chair of Patisserie Valerie, which collapsed in 2018-19).
The latest growth spurt came after Bain Capital acquired a majority stake in Gail’s in 2021 at a valuation of £200mn, along with another fund. The chain had revenues of £135mn in 2023 and expects to open 30 branches this year. Molnar says it has no limit for its network in mind: “We’ve made a commitment only to get bigger if we are getting better . . . You become a chain when you think like a chain.”
He argues that its scale is a strength in raising food standards, buying more supplies from organic and regenerative farms and making its bread widely available as an alternative to the processed kind. “We believe that the food system can be better. That is what we work towards.”
The appeal of Gail’s is obvious. The queue for service in Walthamstow is matched in other branches. It is a highly professional operation, with five central bakeries in cities including Bristol and Manchester serving groups of cafés, with the most delicate items, such as croissants, baked on the premises. It has pioneered artisanry at scale.
But it is hard for a brand to be seen as an integral part of any neighbourhood when it is everywhere. As Bell says, “part of craft bakery’s appeal is localism and provenance, so there is an inherent tension in expansion.” The larger the Gail’s network gets, the greater the tension becomes.
Many UK high streets could do with more chains opening, rather than closing. Molnar says that Gail’s cafés bring traffic to nearby stores and its current growth is made easier by rents falling as other shops are vacated. “We want to be a slice of the high street, not to be a dominant force,” he says.
There is little stopping it at the moment, to judge by the scene in Walthamstow. Local shoppers were voting with their custom, despite the petition. Some might have regretted that Gail’s fails to meet the ideal of a local craft bakery, but not enough to stay away.
