This feature first appeared in April 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
Vegetarian restaurants might feel like a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps borne of the environmental and hippy movements of the 1960s. In fact, London got its very first veggie restaurant as early as 1879. And not just one: they popped up like radishes in the late Victorian era.
“No fish! No Flesh! No Fowl! No Intoxicants!”
That was the rallying cry of London’s first vegetarian restaurant, which opened at 429 Oxford Street in 1879. The Alpha Food Reform Restaurant was greeted with scorn. “Dietetic madcaps,” was one judgement. It’ll never work, was the consensus. The press even ran jokes — or what passed for jokes in 1879:
Eating a meat-free diet was considered a little eccentric to most people in the 19th century, but it wasn’t unheard of. Indeed, veggies had been noted since ancient times and included in their number several prominent Londoners of previous generations, such as Percy Shelley and Benjamin Franklin. 1847 saw the foundation of The Vegetarian Society, who did much to promote the health and financial benefits of a meat-free life. The movement was also tied up with religious and temperance (no alcohol) movements. And at the centre of it all was a pioneering restaurant: the Alpha.
Eccentric roots
The Alpha was the brainchild of the Dr Thomas Low Nichols (1815-1901) and his wife Mary Sargeant Gove Nichols (1810-1884). This American couple were prominent health campaigners, but also avid ramblers through the realms of quackery. They’d set up base at 429 Oxford Street (later to be renumbered to 23) a few years before the restaurant opened, using the buildings as a base for their many dietary projects and products.
Dr Nichols was best known for writing How to live on Sixpence a Day (1873), a guide to thrifty living whose central tenet was a vegetarian diet. But you could also apply to his 'Sanitary Depot' for any number of other health interventions. His mysterious 'Food of Health' — a wheat-based substance of “peculiar deliciousness” — was widely advertised from 1875. It was the chief ingredient of 'Reform Bread', sold at nearby bakers.
Another long-standing interest of the Nichols duo was hydropathy, the unscientific practice of using water baths to promote health and cure disease. For 63 shillings, you could purchase Nichols’s portable hydropathic fountain bath, which could apparently cure constipation, piles and “all the weaknesses and disorders of the generative organs in both sexes”.
Mary and Thomas Nichols could easily fill an article in their own right. They’d fled the American Civil War after living in a free-love community; they campaigned against vaccinations and military conscription, but for universal suffrage and practical clothing; they wrote a book together on the history of marriage (having tied the knot on the same day Mary had been granted a divorce from her previous husband). Dr Nichols also found time to serve a four-month prison sentence for libel, write three novels, practice spiritualism, and grow a nice beard. But let’s get back on focus…
The Nichols couple had long been plugged into the vegetarian community and had witnessed the success of vegetarian restaurants in Manchester and Liverpool, where manual labourers had been grateful for the lower-cost meals. So, in 1879, they converted the ground floor of their Sanitary Depot into London’s very first vegetarian restaurant. It was an instant hit.
Stepping inside
By all accounts, the Alpha was something of a curiosity. You couldn’t miss the frontage opposite the Oxford Music Hall, thanks to its idiosyncratic window display:
“The doctor had also ideas of his own respecting boots, and in consequence the window of the little shop was for a long time filled, not only with lentils, nuts, grapes, and haricot beans, but with sundry strangely shaped specimens of "hygienic foot-wear," which were the pride and joy of their inventor, and the wonder of every passer-by.” - Marylebone Mercury, 2 May 1908
Step inside and you’d have found a fairly large dining space. Its walls were lined with placards extolling the virtues of a meat-free diet. The tables, meanwhile, were marble-topped and bereft of tablecloth. An 1880 report in The Graphic speaks of around 80 covers, with space for 30 diners in the front room and a further 50 in the rear long room. Accounts vary as to how busy it got, but perhaps 300-400 people visited each day.
Lentil cutlets and Maize Mush
Reviews were generally favourable. One critic was pleased with the food, but thought service slow. “…perhaps it is part of the system to help digestion and correct our insular tendency to hurry through our food by giving ample time between the courses.”
The dishes, as with any restaurant, changed regularly. But surviving copies of the menu give a snapshot. This one is from 1889:
Hardly ambrosial, but good, solid fare at a decent price. The restaurant seemed particularly proud of its porridge, which often featured in advertisements. I think I’d opt for the ‘maize mush’, followed by macaroni and tomato omelette, but you might prefer the savoury pie in parsley sauce; perhaps a lentil cutlet or three. I can’t say I’d be much tempted by the desserts. Cold rice? Wheat and fruit? MACARONI AND JAM? Think I’ll just have a coffee, thanks.
Celebrity clientele
Who ate at the Alpha? Well, George Bernard Shaw for one. The Irish playwright and noted vegetarian visited on November 1887. Sadly, he doesn’t leave us an acerbic review, merely noting in his diary that he spent 11d on the fare. Mohandas (later Mahatma) Gandhi was almost certainly another patron of the Alpha. The Indian political figure studied law in London during the late 1880s and early 90s, and was a noted member of the London Vegetarian Society.
The wider clientele, judging from press reports, sounds like a mix of proper vegetarians and the merely veg-curious. “Many of [the customers] are attracted to the rooms by the novelty of the thing, simply for the purpose of experimenting,” offers one account. Just as today, the roving foodie will seek out London’s latest cuisines and novel dining experiences.
Another writer describes the Alpha and similar restaurants as the haunt of clerks and “others on small incomes with big appetites”. The place was particularly popular with workers at the Crosse and Blackwell factory in adjacent Soho Square, for example. It also put on special dinners and gatherings. Various Temperance and Vegetarian groups met there, of course, but press accounts also speak of special arrangements being laid on for a party of printers, and another meal for cabmen and their wives.
Springing up like mushrooms
The Alpha proved a huge success, and soon other vegetarian restaurants appeared across London, like peas in a pod. A dining guide from 1885 can recommend the gustatory delights of the Arcadian in Queen Street (off Cheapside); the Apple Tree on London Wall; the Wheat Sheaf in Rathbone Place (still trading as a pub); the Porridge Bowl in High Holborn; the Rose in South Place; and The Cafe in Bell Yard, Fleet Street.
Many others would come and go over the years, but the movement seemed popular and sustainable. Here’s a map from 1898, almost 20 years after the Alpha opened, showing the spread of wholly vegetarian restaurants across the capital:
In 1888, a few of these restaurants clubbed together to open the first entirely vegetarian hotel at 40 Strand (known as the Buckingham Hotel). Diners on the opening night were treated, among other dishes, to plant-based turtle soup, the omnipresent lentil cutlets and gooseberry tart. The hotel appears to have lasted at least a decade. It is marked on the 1898 map above as number 11, next to Charing Cross station.
Back on Oxford Street, the Alpha finally closed in 1908, but it was not the end of the movement. Vegetarian restaurants have been a feature of London life ever since, rising and falling in popularity but never entirely going away. Recent decades have seen an unprecedented growth, to the point where the city can now claim some 400 restaurants that are fully vegan, never mind vegetarian.
I would love to finish by claiming that you can still dine on the site of the Alpha. Sadly, the spot is today occupied by the modern ‘One Oxford Street’ office block that recently went up over the western entrance to Tottenham Court Road tube station. Perhaps they could number a side door as “One-alpha” in tribute to London’s first veggie restaurant.
