Before refrigeration, London’s ice came by boat from Norwegian lakes and was stored in wells beside the canal
The Ice Wharf at Camden Lock holds a 4.1 from six thousand five hundred and one people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is a Wetherspoon named after one of the strangest industries this city ever had.
The ice trade
Before refrigeration, if you wanted ice in London, somebody had to bring it to you.
And from the middle of the nineteenth century, that meant Norway.
Ice was cut from frozen Norwegian lakes in enormous blocks, in winter, by men with saws. It was shipped to London. It came up the Regent’s Canal by barge.
And it was stored, at Camden, in ice wells – vast brick-lined pits, sunk deep into the ground, in which the ice sat, insulated, melting slowly, for months.
Carlo Gatti
Who ran it, and who is one of the great forgotten Londoners.
He was Swiss-Italian. He arrived with nothing. He sold chestnuts and waffles from a stall.
And he built an ice empire – importing on an industrial scale, storing it at Camden, and distributing it across London by cart.
And then he used it.
Because with ice, you can make ice cream – and Carlo Gatti is generally credited with being the man who first sold ice cream to the ordinary public in London, at a price a working person could pay.
Before him it was a luxury for the rich. He sold it for a penny, in a small glass called a penny lick, which the customer licked clean and handed back.
The penny lick
Which was, in public health terms, a catastrophe.
The same glass. Handed back. Rinsed, at best, in a bucket of water that was changed rarely.
And it was eventually banned, on entirely sound grounds, because it was an extremely efficient method of distributing tuberculosis.
What replaced it was the edible container.
The ice cream cone exists because the glass had to go.
The wells are still there
Under the London Canal Museum, a few miles away, there is an ice well – one of Gatti’s – and you can look down into it.
It is enormous. It is deeper than a house is tall. And it held ice that had been cut out of a lake in Norway by a man with a saw.
Verdict
Cheap, enormous, honest number on a very large sample – and it is being marked down, as every cheap venue in this survey is, for being available.
Go, and look at the canal, and think about the ice.
What killed the trade
Mechanical refrigeration, and it happened fast.
Once you could make ice locally, in a machine, there was no reason whatsoever to cut it out of a Norwegian lake, put it on a ship, sail it across the North Sea, drag it up a canal, and bury it in a pit.
An entire international industry – with ships, and wells, and carts, and a workforce – simply evaporated within a generation.
Six postcodes and six hundred and forty-nine articles, and it never varies. The arcade died because the machines stopped being better. The jute went because Bengal started spinning its own.
An industry is not killed by a rival. It is killed by somebody making the whole thing unnecessary.
Lowri Griffiths brings a distinct voice to satirical journalism, combining cultural critique with dry humour. Influenced by London’s creative networks, her writing reflects both wit and discipline.
Her authority stems from experience, while trust is built through transparency and ethical satire.
