Britain’s bake divide

How Greggs or Pret really decide where the North-South split is

To many, the Watford Gap is nothing but a mundane M1 service station en route to the North.

But it may actually mark the dividing line between the North and South of England. That is, depending on how seriously you take the subject of lunch.

Because a study has found that the area, named after a low-lying strip of land near Watford, Northamptonshire, is the point at which high street bakery Greggs, a beacon of northernness, becomes more popular than the southerners’ sandwich shop of choice, Pret A Manger.

If the national consumption of steak bakes versus houmous wraps were not convincing enough, the researchers also looked at the distribution of Morrisons and Waitrose supermarkets across England. This, too, put the North-South divide within two miles of the Watford Gap.

Both calculations agree that Birmingham, Coventry and Leicester are technically in the North. Bizarrely, the dividing line classifies Cornwall as northern – there are no

Prets in the county, but it is home to a couple of Greggs, despite rows over the bakery’s pasty recipe.

The analysis, published online by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University, was brought to the attention of a wider audience at Cheltenham Science Festival. Dr Robin Smith, the physicist who led the study, said: ‘The food we eat is a very good indicator of whether someone is northern or southern. The North really may start at the Watford Gap, just as people say.’

Greggs opened its first bakery in Newcastle in 1951 and has more than 2,000 outlets in the UK. Pret, which has just over 400, first opened in Hampstead, north London, in 1984.

Researchers used a machinelearning statistical method to work out the line dividing the most Greggs from Prets.

They then used an artificial neural network to assign a value to each area based on its number of

outlets. Both measures put the diagonal divide as roughly cutting across Peterborough.

The Pret- Greggs line closely matches the North-South divide based on average household income, also analysed in the study, with those in the North generally lower than in the South.