East London fish smoker scales the heights with protected status
IT HAS always been a tightly-guarded trade secret among London’s 20th century fish merchants, and now the London Cure – the East End method for smoking salmon – has been awarded the same protected status as champagne.
Lance Forman, the owner and chairman of fourth generation smokehouse H Forman & Son, has been awarded the sought-after label for his London Cure smoked salmon, more than 120 years after his great-great-grandfather first opened for business at Billingsgate Fish Market, where the now-famous curing process was first perfected.
Congratulating Mr Forman on his achievement, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said the designation was a “fantastic” endorsement of “London and the UK food industry as a whole”. London is the first capital city to be awarded a European Union Protected Geographical Indication.
While Mr Forman said he was “very proud” to have been awarded the status, he pointed out that the business had faced ruin only 10 years ago, when the London Development Agency (LDA) attempted to relocate the smokehouse in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
Issued with a compulsory purchase order in 2005, H Forman & Sons faced being uprooted from Stratford, where it has been situated since 1905, in order to make way for the Olympic Park.
When Mr Forman, who is a former special adviser to Conservative MP Peter Lilley, refused, a fierce dispute ensued – with the future of the 122-year-old business resting in the balance.
Detailing the long-running feud in his book Forman’s Games, Mr Forman revealed how he had fought to secure a fairer deal amid resistance from Ken Livingstone and other “bureaucrats”, whom he accused of being as “slippery as the great-crested newts”.
After five years of negotiations, the LDA agreed to new terms, allowing the business to remain in Stratford while moving only 200 metres to the Fish Island area. The business has since flourished, with H. Forman & Sons establishing a reputation during the 2012 Games as one of the world’s finest salmon smokehouses.
Mr Forman pointed out that if his business had been forced to move to the LDA’S proposed site in Leyton which is further east in the borough of Waltham Forest, the designation – lim- ited to the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham – may not have been possible.
“There were three reasons we wanted to stay in the area, and one of them was that this is our heritage,” he added. “During the negotiations we had offers to relocate all over the country, and I said ‘no, no, no, you don’t understand, we need to be in East London’.
“We’ve been in the heart of East London for well over 100 years ago, so making sure we stayed put was crucial.
“We were one of three hundred businesses affected during the Olympic planning, and around 100 of those never made it through. It was really touch and go whether we would survive, because they didn’t give us anytime to move. The whole thing was absolutely catastrophic.” Mr Forman added that the success of his business showed the need for the Government to place small businesses at the heart of its industrial strategy.
“The focus in my view has to be on how to make good businesses in this country thrive,” he continued. “Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, but one of the big problems is that the corporate world appears to suffer increasingly from short-termism. Family businesses like ours don’t do that, we are thinking about the next 25 years or so. I think if politicians approached business strategy in the same way, it would be much better for the economy.”
Visiting the factory earlier in the day, Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, said: “London Cure smoked salmon has been cherished by foodlovers in the capital for generations.
“It will now rightly sit alongside Cornish sardines, Conwy mussels and Whitstable oysters as examples of the world-class produce that uphold our reputation as a great food nation.”
‘We’ve been in the heart of East London for over 100 years, so making sure we stayed put was crucial’