Foreword

“You must be mad!” Derisive remarks such as this were once familiar to anyone announcing their intention to quit their job and start a microbakery, or even simply to make their own bread. After all, supermarket loaves are cheap as chips and they stay soft forever. Making your own is a waste of time and you’d have to be a crank to want to bake for a living.

Accusations of commercial naivety bordering on irrationality certainly came my way in the 1970s when I was starting a bakery in a small Cumbrian village using wholemeal/wholewheat flour from the local watermill. But 40 years on, sales of white loaves in the UK are down by 75% since 1974, with a concurrent rise in “brown” and wholemeal. Government figures don’t reveal how much of the switch has been away from industrial loaves in favour of Real Bread, but they confirm that the bread scene in Britain is changing like never before.