Are these the tell-tale clues you’re upper-crust?
Once it was home to budget basics. Now, with fans like Kate Moss, it’s all chorizo arancini and terribly chic crisps
HYACInTH Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) was on the right track as she tried to convince everyone – the neighbours especially – that she was posher than posh.
For calling your parents mummy and daddy well into adulthood – as the great pretender in BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances did – is seen as sure sign you’re upper crust.
A poll ranking the top 40 clues to poshness from 2,000 responses would please Mrs Bucket enormously because it seems it’s the little details that count, rather than having lots of money.
Some 81 per cent of Britons believe wealth is not proof you’re plummy – but your turn of phrase (it’s the loo, not the toilet, darling) and the clothes you wear (jolly gilets and wellies) are. However, the survey by Perspectus Global found only 22 per cent wished they were to the manor born.
FoRGEt the harvey Nichols food hall. No need to nip into Fortnum & Mason for a scotch egg. Begone, Waitrose. Guess where Kate Moss has been spotted stocking up on groceries in a velvet blazer and cowboy boots?
Yep, it’s the Co-op. Leaving her local branch in the Cotswolds recently, the supermodel was spotted clutching not only a quilted Chanel 2.55 handbag, but a minty green, biodegradable Co-op carrier, too.
to be fair, Kate’s merely confirming what a few of us have known for a while: the Co- op is dead chic and the only place to shop.
In the past year, with so many of us grounded at home and shopping more locally as a result, the Co-op’s popularity has soared.
according to its chief executive Steve Murrells, 1.7 million households shopped at the Co-op for the first time during the pandemic. Little wonder. It’s a very convenient place: small enough for a quick dart round to buy the essentials; not so big that a visit warrants a trolley and feels like an ordeal.
Between September and December last year, three stores opened each week across the UK (creating 1,000 jobs in the process), taking the total number of Co-ops around Britain to 2,600.
I’ve long been a fan, although I tend to schlep around my local branch in slippers instead of Kate’s Chanel (nobody in South London seems to mind this much).
the staff there have become used to seeing me, often more than once a day and in various mental states: weary in the morning when I trudge around the aisles to pick up coffee and the newspapers; usually a bit perkier later on when I return for a bottle of sauvignon blanc and a bag of the Co-op’ s famous, own-brand salt and vinegar crisps.
What? You haven’t tried them? You must! to be more precise, they’re Sea Salt & Chardonnay Wine Vinegar crisps and they’ve developed a cult following thanks to their sharpness. they’ll make you wince like an unsuspecting baby sucking on a lemon for the first time. I take them to every dinner party (remember those?) since no other crisps come close.
Forget Kettle chips or tyrrells, or even those grim torres crisps that taste of truffle. Much grander to take a bag of these.
‘I ate so many of those crisps at the weekend that I removed a layer of my tongue,’ says another fan, who happens to shop at the same branch as Kate.
But it’s not just a posh bit of the Cotswolds that boasts a particularly good Co-op. they’re popping up all over the place.
You’ll find one in Suffolk’s bougie seaside town, aldeburgh, and last summer in Somerset, Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis opened one in the festival village of Pilton.
My mother’s nearest branch in West Sussex, in the pretty market town of Petworth, has just been spruced up. Breezing around the aisles there is like stepping into a Jilly Cooper novel. You might come across a handsome argentinian polo player, over to play at nearby Cowdray Park, or local celebrities, such as Maggie Smith or Bryan Ferry, who’ve nipped in to pick up a bunch of tulips for a fiver.
When I lived in North Norfolk for a few months not so long ago, I would drive to the Co-op in Wellsnextthe- Sea where elderly Norfolk grandees, often wearing headscarves, could be spotted bent double over freezer cabinets trying to decide between Cook’s Chicken alexander or Beef Bourguignon for their supper.
the Co- op has become increasingly upmarket over the past few years. In addition to a partnership with the aforementioned, and very middle- class, frozen food company Cook, it also announced a roll- out of John Lewis’s Click and Collect delivery service across more than 500 stores.
In February, there was particularly exciting news for cheese fans: following the opening of the store in Pilton, the Co-op revealed it had landed the exclusive contract to sell cheese made from milk from Glastonbury cows. See? I told you, dead smart. Presumably Kate, a big fan of the festival, picked up a hunk of it on her Cotswolds expedition.
My love affair with the chain began when I was small. I grew up in the Scottish Borders, and the nearest town, Duns, had a Co-op. My mother would occasionally let me slip a bottle of Irn-Bru and packet of haribo into her basket.
as an adult living in London, my tastes became ( slightly) more sophisticated and I began to appreciate the range it sold. Fairtrade coffee (it became the first British retail chain to stock Fairtrade products in all of its stores in 1998); fresh meat sourced only from British farmers (‘the steaks are delicious,’ muses my mother), and I don’t mean to go on about this, but its sauvignon blanc really is excellent. Go on, try the £6.85 Kiwi Runestone with some of those crisps. If you’ve got friends coming over for supper, throw a few items from the own-brand Irresistible range into your basket and pretend you’ve knocked them up yourself. Potato dauphinoise? No problem. Chorizo arancini? You got it. Salmon en croute? Slide it out of the foil packet before dishing it up and nobody will ever know. My devotion to the shop is such that the heroines in my novels also tend to shop in the Co-op, often traipsing there sadly for starchy, sugary sustenance when they have a hangover or are suffering from heartbreak. I’ll admit, after my last break-up I spent an embarrassing amount of money on cans of ambrosia rice pudding bought from the Co-op, which I spooned directly from the can while on my sofa.
the British chain has come a long way since its beginnings in the industrial Lancastrian town of Rochdale. there, in 1844, a gang of solemn-looking, whiskery men who worked in the cotton mills decided to create a fairer way of feeding hungry mouths.
the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ scraped together enough capital to open a shop which initially sold just four products: flour, oatmeal, butter and sugar. No crisps or wine for them, alas. they also introduced the concept of profit-sharing that became known as the dividend.
It paid customers back a certain amount of cash depending on how much they bought, and nowadays is shared through its membership card scheme. the Co-op (originally the Cooperative Wholesale Society) spread across the country from Rochdale, and has always tried to retain its ethical, everyman principles. In 1942, it became the first shop to allow self- service. a hilarious Pathe news clip from this time shows a dumpy housewife in Barking picking a bag of flour from the shelf in front of her and staring at it in wonder. ‘So handy if you only want one article,’ she tells the assistant. ‘You can pop in and take it off the shelf and pop off again. So much nicer.’ It was the first British chain to ban common pesticides from its produce in 2001; a year later it was the first to launch biodegradable carrier bags.
More recently, it’s announced that its fleet of home delivery vans will all be electric by 2025 and banned sales of peat- based compost. If you happen to live near a Milton Keynes or Northampton branch, you can have your milk and eggs delivered by electricpowered robots that look like small cool boxes on wheels.
In November, the Co-op opened a whopping, £3 million ‘eco-friendly’ store in Lichfield, Staffs, with more efficient fridges and a ‘zero-waste refill hub’ where punters can fill their own containers with organic chickpeas and nuts.
I’ll probably stick to the sauvignon blanc myself, but each to their own.
It’s just comforting to know that, as I return to my suburban Co-op for the third time in one day because I forgot to buy loo roll, I’m not only saving the planet but also following in the footsteps of supermodel greatness. Seriously, try the crisps. You won’t regret it.