This is the story of the Roman Road, an East End pie and mash shop, and the lives and loves of the people who have worked and eaten there.
G. Kelly’s Pie & Mash has been run by the same family in the Roman Road in Bow for nearly a hundred years; an East End institution and the still point of a turning world.
Outside its windows the Roman Road has seen an extraordinary revolution – from women’s liberation and industrialisation to world wars and immigration – and yet at its heart it remains one of the last traditional market roads of London.
Pie & Mash Down the Roman Road is the biography of that shop and of the people – customers, suppliers, employees, owners – who passed through it, and continue to do so.
Through vivid tales of ordinary lives the book tells the extraordinary story of the community living around the oldest trading route in Britain, and the true heart of the East End.
Melanie McGrath was born in Essex, and is the author of critically acclaimed, bestselling non-fiction, including Silvertown and The Long Exile, and writes fiction as M.J. McGrath. She also writes for the national press and is a regular broadcaster on radio.
Duncan Barrett is the author – with Nuala Calvi – of the bestselling The Sugar Girls and G.I. Brides, and, on his own, Men of Letters.
Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.
We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.
