Why Cricklewood is home of the crisp

Smith’s Crisps was Britain’s first crisps manufacturer, starting right here in Cricklewood. Join us for a dip into the surprisingly wild history of crisps as we reminisce over Smith’s long-lost Bovril flavour.

It began in a garage in Cricklewood in 1920, when a man named Frank Smith started making potato crisps with his wife. The story goes that Mrs Smith cut and fried the potatoes, while Mr Smith packed the crisps and sold them in the pub next door, the Cricklewood Crown.

After the year we’ve had of home cooking experiments, it’s easy to picture the two of them in their garage cooking up a mountain of taters, chasing that perfect fry. But unlike most people, the Smiths’ pandemic pastime at the tail end of the Spanish flu was destined for greatness beyond the local pub. Smith’s Crisps grew steadily, soon selling across London from the back of a pony and trap. Within a year, the couple had hired a dozen full-time staff to keep up with demand.

Smith’s was Britain’s first manufacturer of crisps, and their place in history is earned by innovation too: they were the first in the country to sell salted crisps. Crisps used to be sold plain and you had to reach for the salt shaker, but Frank Smith grew tired of his shakers going missing in the pub. So he came up with the idea of ‘salt ‘n’ shake’, where crisps came in a greaseproof bag with a little blue sachet of salt to add. The world has never looked back.

Smith’s Snackfood Company expanded rapidly through the 1920s and 30s, opening several more factories. By 1934, Smith’s produced 90% of the UK’s crisps and by 1956, the company was making 10 million packets every week. But competition was snapping at their heels. Crisps are good business, and by the 1960s, rivals had overtaken Smith’s as the biggest UK manufacturers by focusing on selling to kids, teenagers and housewives, whereas Smith’s continued to focus on the traditional crisps market of hotels and pubs.

In response, Smith’s spent the next few years coming up with some proper bangers, such as Chipsticks. The 1970s were the glory days of crisp innovation, with some brilliant advertising alongside. “Smiths’ much-imitated Chipsticks took a patriotic approach, with packet design and TV advertising that riffed on saucy seaside postcard humour, initially aimed at an adult audience with lashings of innuendo but soon softened to kid-friendly Punch and Judy show standards,” Steve Berry and Phil Norman write in their 2014 book, A Brief History of Crisps. Berry and Norman quote some research findings by Smith’s: “Northerners prefer barbecue chicken and other meaty flavours. In the Midlands, cheese crisps take over, and down south the milder tastes are preferred.”

What is certain is that Smith’s invented a lot of odd crisps during the 1970s, including the Onyums, a type of onion rings, a groundbreaking spiral-shaped potato puff called either Quirls or Twirls depending on which part of the country you bought them, the “mystery flavour” Zodiacs, the lattice-shaped Chekkers, and Farmer Browns, a farmyard miscellany promising “bags of moo, neigh, woof, baa and cock-a-doodle-doo”. The deeply beefy flavour of Smith’s long-lost Bovril crisps is still spoken about with reverence in crisp-review forums, a surprisingly passionate corner of the internet.

The winners from Smith’s wilderness years were Quavers and Monster Munch, although look closely at those packets today and you’ll see there’s a Walkers logo. This is the result of a long-winded series of mergers and acquisitions that took place across the tempestuous crisp sector over the past 50 years. But Smith’s still gets credit for Frazzles – “exciting flavour, superior to that of any bacon flavour product.” Those packets still carry the Smith’s logo even though the brand was eventually subsumed under the PepsiCo multinational.

Next time you’re in the pub, also look out for those little packets of Bacon Fries and Scampi Fries on the wall. Instant classics from the moment they were launched in the 1980s, they’re keeping alive the spirit of the crisps that Mr and Mrs Smith once dreamt up in a garage in Cricklewood.

Photo at top shows employees at the Smith’s Crisps Factory in Cricklewood putting crisps into packets, c. 1930-1939. Photo courtesy of Brent Museum and Archives.