From seaside rollercoasters to the perfect chippy tea, Bolton-born writer Hannah Ralph finds the spirit of her childhood – and an uncanny slice of the Fylde Coast – on the other side of the world
It’s 7pm on a sticky-hot evening in Melbourne, Australia, and I’m staring up at The Blackpool Tower. This isn’t some miraculous architectural migration, nor is it a heat-induced hallucination (although built for the southern hemisphere I am ostensibly not). It is, rather, a popular menu item at Melbourne’s UK-style chip shop, Northern Soul, serving British takeaway classics some 10,000 miles from home.
It’s the same chippy that, one salty dunk of curry sauce at a time, sees my homesickness recede like the South Shore tide, exposing abandoned buckets and spades and concrete revetments slick with sludge. It’s a deep-fried time-machine, hurtling me back to the Blackpool of my childhood on tiny legs, mounting the stone lions at Stanley Park. I’m suddenly the birthday girl at the top of the tower, flaunting my lifetime free-entry – a laminated pass issued to all local babes born on the centenary of its opening – like a royal decree. I fight the impulse to tell every Aussie in the shop that I still hold the keys to this magical kingdom, knowing full well they wouldn’t have the foggiest, or indeed a single reason to care.
Two people who might, though, are Northern Soul’s owners, Jessica Tosh and Joe Grimshaw. The Mancunian duo came to Australia back in 2015 – Jess a then-21-year-old interior designer from Bamford, and Joe, a 22-year-old electrician from Urmston. Forgoing the usual backpacking circuit, the pair quickly settled here – in the seaside suburb of St Kilda, Melbourne. And yet, for the all the charms of Australia’s cultural capital, it lacked something vital, something it takes moving to the far side of the planet to truly miss: the Great British Fish and Chip Shop.
‘We started this place as a taste of home,’ Jess tells me of Northern Soul, her accent heroically immune to a decade of Antipodean influence. ‘It certainly wasn’t on our bingo card to open up a chippy, but Joe noticed there was a lack of British food while working the Aussie festival circuit, and the idea was born.’ Post-revelation, the pair purchased an old caravan in 2018, which they painstakingly converted into a food truck in time for their first festival, some two years later.
‘It was a disaster,’ Jess admits, laughing. ‘We’d ordered about 20 times more food then any other vendor and didn’t have a clue.’ Since this was early 2020, there was another snag impending: a global pandemic. It meant, not only were they sitting on a mountain of stock that they needed to store, but now they had nowhere to sell it, either.
‘We ended up making sausage rolls with the leftovers and delivered them all over Melbourne, which, bizarrely enough, is how we built our customer base – with sausage rolls.’ A northern business model, if there ever was one. Then, as lockdown eased, the duo managed to get the food truck back in operation in the car park of a local pub, leading to a runaway success so total, they had their first brick-and-mortar shop within the year.
‘I would say when we first started,’ Jess begins, ‘our customers were probably 90 per cent British, but now it’s more like 50/50: half are loyal Aussie locals, and half are expats and visitors from the UK.’ That Northern Soul has kept so many weekly regulars from those early food truck days speaks volumes. ‘We’ve even had some older Brits who haven’t been home for some 40 or 50 years, coming in for their first chippy tea in decades,’ Jess adds. ‘Things like that really resonate with us. We’re always trying to replicate that sense of homecoming, that spirit of community.’
More magical moments include a recent visit from a northern soul enthusiast, who – interest piqued by a fish and chip shop named in honour of the eponymous 1970s movement – packed his suitcase with some 200 northern soul CDs for Jess and Joe. They’ll get use, too: the chippy features a full DJ set-up, all thanks to Joe’s love of groovy tunes and years working the music festival scene. Last year, Northern Soul even made the regional papers, when DJ Fatboy Slim slipped in to play an hour-long set behind the counter.
But it isn’t just the whiff of malt vinegar and low thrum of northern accents working the fryers that feels familiar: this scrappy little suburb even has its own Pleasure Beach. Luna Park, a heritage-listed landmark, is nothing short of the Blackpool original’s long lost twin, as if separated at birth and placed on decidedly different ships. And while the Pleasure Beach is currently blowing out the candles out on 130 years, having opened in 1896, it’s actually Luna Park that claims the world’s oldest continually operating rollercoaster: The Great Scenic Railway, which has rattled along wooden tracks since the park’s debut in 1912 (Blackpool’s first, the Big Dipper, opened in 1923).
And maybe it’s because I arrived to this spot on an old-timey tram (yet another thing to which Melbourne lays claim: the world’s largest operational tram network); maybe it’s because the Great Scenic Railway is towering over me in stacks of white, wooden criss-crosses like the Grand National’s sunnier sister; or maybe it’s because there’s a beach, just across the road. But at this point, not even a resurrected Steve Irwin himself could jolt me from my reverie – the gnawing feeling that my Grandma and Grandad were about to tootle around the corner, bundled in big coats, ready to take me around Squire’s Gate for sweets.
It’s a common complaint levelled at Melbourne: that it doesn’t feel quite Australian enough. European, almost. Even St Kilda’s beach – no doubt a few loose McDonalds wrappers bumping breezily along the sands as we speak – can appear more like your average Tuesday at Starr Gate, given you catch it on grey enough day. It explains why my DNA, the particular twist of Bolton brick and Blackpool rock that it is, appears to be unzipping in real time; the dawning realisation that I’d been tricked into a warmer, slightly more shark-infested verisimilitude of what I’d left behind.
To that end, Jess has a solution. ‘The things we miss the most,’ she tells me, ‘we just end up recreating in the shop.’ It’s why, soon, sausage rolls are set to make a spectacular return to the menu – a throwback to that first festival disaster, yes, but also to Jess and Joe’s pining for Greggs, that holy grail of British high streets. As for missing family, much of Jess’s moved to Australia – her mum, who lives nearby, bakes all the Bakewell Tarts for the chippy. I had one. It was delicious.
The truth is, no matter the ingredients, my childhood is just about the one thing I can’t recreate – too many of the key players have gone. Still, if you can find a spot of time travel at the bottom of a chip bag in suburban Melbourne, you’d be a fool not to take the trip. Wouldn’t you?.
@northernsoulchipshop
