Street food is all around you. But probably not on the street vendors in trucks and gazebos have a hard time securing permission and space from councils, so they gather in disused car parks at night, or form mini food terraces in the privately owned public spaces that fill British cities. At the Trinity shopping centre in Leeds, a scissor elevator hoists repurposed horse boxes up the outside of the building and into the first-floor food court. The wheels of street food are turning so fast that soon they wont touch the ground: the developers of Battersea power station, in south London, promise a third-floor street food market in the sky. SSP, the company responsible for all those Upper Crusts and Ritazza coffee shops in train stations and airports, is signing up food trucks. There is something touchingly double-edged about the idea of a mobile vendor stuck at a transport terminal. It seems both brilliant for travellers looking for food, and contrary to the promise of free-roaming, pop-up, impulsive, informal dining that first took hungry people to trucks.
As if to prove that street food is reaching saturation point, even KFC now runs a truck, and the street food vendor is a trope of romcoms (see Chef, The Five-Year Engagement, etc). Usually, because street food is seen as a kind of social saviour, the vendor as he appears in romcoms is a guy in search of a life with more soul. No wonder that in parts of the US, food writers have decreed the end of the food truck. But what about Britain? Has the street food revolution, as one book has it, democratised good honest food or moved it further from reach?
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