{"id":311190,"date":"2025-08-02T06:05:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T06:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311190\/"},"modified":"2025-08-02T06:05:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T06:05:13","slug":"hidden-london-bread-by-bike-the-kentish-town-bakery-that-kick-started","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311190\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden London: Bread by Bike, the Kentish Town bakery that kick-started"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

Bread<\/a> fresh from the oven. Step inside the blue frontage of Kentish Town<\/a>\u2019s Bread by Bike and that\u2019s the first thing you notice, the smell: rich and warm and comforting. The ovens still humming. Then it\u2019s all the loaves on display: racks of them, most steaming slightly on the shelves, sitting next to vast bags of flour. Focaccia too. It\u2019s a carb-lover\u2019s paradise, complete with thick slabs of Basque cheesecake and endless pastries. Inside it is simple, understated: plain wooden tables, clear white walls, a blackboard, a little in the way of art. What they bake is why people come.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to deny that London<\/a>\u2019s bakeries<\/a> are having a moment \u2014 sometimes it\u2019s hard to walk down a street without seeing a new one, usually with a Birkenstock-clad crowd waiting, patiently and impatiently, to get inside \u2014 but Bread By Bike feels special. It is somewhere locals treasure \u2014 a far cry from the Gail\u2019s that in some parts of town get picketed.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s because it\u2019s been around for almost a decade, slowly building its regulars. The brand began in 2016 when Andy Strang, trying to finish his dissertation for his physics PhD, found himself hopelessly distracted by baking. He spotted a gap in the market \u2014 only in London \u2014 for hand-baked sourdough<\/a> breads delivered, as the name says, by bike.<\/p>\n

World-beating Hippy sourdough<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Press handout<\/p>\n

It began with deliveries to friends, which proved popular enough for Strang began to branch out. He found success: so much so that Bread by Bike opened their store in 2017, followed by the adjoining caf\u00e9 in 2021, for which the money was crowdfunded (the names of contributors are memoralised on a \u201cbacker\u2019s wall\u201d).<\/p>\n

Sourdough, no surprise, started things. But it helped that the market seemed to be changing: pubs are struggling particularly now, but it was bad in 2016 too. And so the bakery and then caf\u00e9 easily found a home. <\/p>\n

Since then, its success seems only to have grown. Perhaps it\u2019s part of the slow living trend: more than ever before, people are paying more attention to what they eat, where it\u2019s come from and how it\u2019s been made.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s been kind of going that way for a good while now, and I think that it\u2019s almost just becoming a norm in a way,\u201d says Dale Strickland, who joined in 2020 and took over full-time from Strang in 2024. \u201cComing to a bakery, it\u2019s an affordable kind of thing to do when you don\u2019t feel like you can head out for an expensive lunch. And I think people are just turning on to the fact that real bread is better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grilled banana bread, whipped mascarpone and a drizzle of espresso draws crowds<\/p>\n

It\u2019s real bread that takes time to get right. Here things start at 3am, which is when the team arrive and get the ball rolling, crafting the bakery\u2019s signature sourdough loaves \u2014 including their best-selling Hippy sourdough, which was a winner at the World Bread Awards in 2019. Of his team, Strickland says: \u201cWe take on a lot of people from low skilled [backgrounds]. They\u2019re either changing career or maybe they\u2019re a home baker. We have quite a strong training programme.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s training that is invaluable given the present crisis with hospitality recruitment. And Strickland needs his team firing on all cylinders: the shop opens at 8am, running till 4pm \u2014 and despite the name, it does far more than bread. There\u2019s an ever-changing caf\u00e9 menu with ambitious items like kohlrabi, chicory and blood orange salads, or Hong Kong-style French toast topped with kaya jam. Grilled banana bread with whipped mascarpone and a drizzle of espresso is already proving popular; they\u2019re experimenting with a twice baked pineapple and coconut croissant; one for pi\u00f1a colada fans.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Press handout<\/p>\n

It\u2019s both Bread by Bike\u2019s fail-safe sourdough and this bold experimental streak that has built a fan base that goes well beyond its Kentish Town neighbourhood. Some come from as far away as Bedfordshire. \u201cYou do get people coming in and saying, \u2018I\u2019ve come all the way from such and such,\u2019 and they\u2019ll buy five rye loaves and go and freeze them,\u201d Strickland says with a smile. \u201cSo, yeah, we do have our fan club.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any celebs? Yes, he says. Some aren\u2019t a secret \u2014 Yotam Ottolenghi gave the spot a shout-out during his latest interview with the Standard<\/a> \u2013 but others are, and Strickland refuses to be drawn on them. \u201cThere\u2019s quite a few,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I probably shouldn\u2019t name drop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps these are the customers that still take advantage of the bike deliveries, which continue even as most customers these days come to the shop in person, all the better to make impulse purchases. Either way, business is booming. \u201cI actually live towards the Crouch End area and I often get people saying, \u2018Why aren\u2019t you opening here?\u2019\u201d Strickland says.<\/p>\n

Well, why not? He\u2019s coy: the answer is they\u2019d like to expand, but \u201cnot in the next year. Right now, we\u2019re focused on being the best we can where we are.\u201d That, and the challenges of supplying their bread to 30-plus wholesale locations around London \u2014 including another personal favourite, Crick\u2019s Caf\u00e9 in Archway \u2014 means that Brecknock Road is likely to remain the only site for now. Still, Strickland feels like there\u2019s no huge rush. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, I\u2019m hoping for a return of Bread by Night, the infrequent supper club that see the caf\u00e9\u2019s interior given over to tapered candles and small plates where strangers sit side by side on the long tables to eat. But whatever happens next, BBB is still going strong, and so is the sourdough starter. \u201cWe haven\u2019t killed our starter since the start,\u201d Strickland says. \u201cIt\u2019s been going for a good while.\u201d Long may it continue. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bread fresh from the oven. Step inside the blue frontage of Kentish Town\u2019s Bread by Bike and that\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[11569,40984,748,393,4884,43189,257,52227,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-311190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-bakeries","9":"tag-bread","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-kentish-town","14":"tag-london","15":"tag-sourdough","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114957669171959607","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}