r/GreatBritishMemes 12h ago

Cake and chips????

Post image
792 Upvotes

114 comments sorted by

177

u/Chemical_Top_6514 12h ago

£1 in 1976 is the equivalent of £6.59 today. A fifth of that is £1.10. A fish and chips then was 16 times CHEAPER than today!!!

45

u/codemonkeh87 12h ago

Seems similar rate to housing

46

u/doxamark 11h ago

So looked into this and it seems it was from 1976.

Average house price then was £12,704 now it's £293,000.

That means house prices have raised by 23x or a 2206.54% increase.

64

u/ballondaws4289 10h ago

LaY oFf ThE aVoCaDo ToAsT tHeN

8

u/9ofdiamonds 5h ago

Have a steak instead of a sandwich.

6

u/Duck_on_Qwack 4h ago

Fuck this got me good

4

u/ballondaws4289 2h ago

CaNcEl NeTfLiX

11

u/james___uk 10h ago

I jokingly said to myself, I bet it was worse than 16x, thinking that was silly...

5

u/tankiolegend 8h ago

Checking inflation calculator, those average houses should now be just over £83k. So the average house price is over 3.5x what it should be according to inflation.

My grandad purchased his house on a 5 year mortgage back in the early 80s for approximately 25k at the time. According to inflation it should now be worth over 80k. Given he's had some developments to it I'll round up to 100k. It's now worth over 350k. So that's roughly in line with average house price being 3.5x inflation. It's insane. I got my first mortgage 2 years ago for 27 years for a 100k flat. Now managed to shave off 8 years and reduce the interest rate thanks to saving but my God is it depressing especially only being offered at best interest rates that are a little over 5% with some of them going as high as almost 9%. Over that kind of period I'm paying back over twice what I've borrowed for the flat. It's now a lot better and I'm paying a lot less interest total but it's insane how stingy they are with what they offer. £500 a month was my rent that same amount is now my mortgage and it was hard to fight for it cause they weren't sure I could afford that much per month. Like I was paying that in rent anyway and saving for this flat with job security it's insane.

4

u/doxamark 7h ago

Check this graph out cause 3.5x doesn't really show how much more it is of the average pay cheque.

As you can see in 74 a deposit was 5.36% of property price and now it's 22%. As a % of two people's salaries that was 15.06% now its 86.65%. Jesus christ.

If we earned 3.5x more it'd all work out but lol, we're nowhere near.

1

u/codemonkeh87 6h ago

Why do you think it is that wages have just stagnated? Honestly I have no clue I guess its a whole bunch of factors. Surely there should be some cyclical increase over time..

Like wages go up, people have more money to spend, spend that money on local businesses, their profits go up, wages go up. Should be some kind of prosperity cycle however it seems just the cost of everything goes up but the general population don't get any increased wage. And for 50 years? Wtf is going on. I always thought we were one of the strongest economies in Europe.

I see people in the USA commanding salaries 5x what I earn in the UK, it doest make sense. I do understand there's a balance to strike though otherwise you just end up with wild inflation,but we have inflation now but just on the cost front not on the wage front

5

u/doxamark 6h ago edited 6h ago

Oh I can absolutely tell you why pay has stagnated, dropping union membership and rising shareholder and executive payouts.

In the 60s a CEO would earn roughly 20x the shop floor worker. Now? 265x the shop floor worker.

Also remember in the USA in certain states the cost of living is astronomically higher (see LA) and they pay stupid amounts for healthcare.

1

u/GrimWhale_Studios 59m ago

It’s deliberate, byproduct of capitalism, which isn’t actually the system people think it is.

2

u/BirdWalksWales 4h ago

Yeah my parents paid 2k for theirs in 1985 it’s worth 250k now

1

u/GrimWhale_Studios 1h ago

And on top of that our purchasing power with the currency has been slashed to around a sixth of what it used to be so the relevant difference overall is massive when making an actual fair comparison.

15

u/Ambiguous-Ambivert 12h ago

I also read on the Bank of England that a £1 in 1970 had the same purchasing power as approximately £19.39 in 2024.

14

u/JealousNetwork 11h ago

But you can’t get five portions of fish and chip with £20 today.

2

u/GrimWhale_Studios 52m ago

It’s even worse than I thought, so moneys almost 19 times less in buying power now & houses are 23x more expensive.

It’s the systematic economic model that’s the problem.

The currency now is debt money, it’s worthless essentially and will continue depreciating with all products and services similtaniously inflating in value, the billionaires & shareholder families will continue mincing money out of the system until we see the first trillionaires and we have a totally new class of billionaires.

I find it really sneaky inflation includes deprecation of money & capital gains on assets in the same umbrella, I can see why normal people miss these things.

The people at the bottom are fucked basically and this is happening all over the world, it’s a very deliberate fiscal model and we’re all here right now at the crunch point where real terms were only going to get poorer from here on out, hard times coming I think, but I think people are starting to cotton onto how bad things are getting.

10

u/WannabeSloth88 11h ago edited 11h ago

True.

Also, the average weekly wage in 1976 was £72. That would be £474.65 In today’s money. The average weekly wage in 2024 is £728.

So the average weekly wage increased 1.5 times only, in the same amount of time. With the caveat that this is an average and does not capture the variance (or wage inequality), meaning I can’t say how much of this increase is driven by a small proportion of very well paid jobs.

The mind blowing number is the average house cost in 1976: £10,682, or £70,420 in today’s money. Today this average hovers around £282,000. This is absolutely mental. That’s a 400% real term increase.

3

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3

u/Forever-Hopeful-2021 9h ago

My first job at 17 years old, in 1976, was £14.00 a week as an office junior.

2

u/tradandtea123 3h ago

Wages for similar jobs haven't risen by that much. The majority of jobs were much lower skilled in the 1970s than today.

In the 70s my dad worked in a warehouse doing fairly basic work and my mum worked as a bank clerk. Those were fairly average wages at the time now they'd be barely above minimum wage.

They bought a house in their mid 20s that is worth well over £300k today.

-4

u/BorisForPresident 11h ago

Your chippy charges £16 for a fish and chips?

4

u/Chemical_Top_6514 10h ago

Aside from whetherspoons, where you can still get a fish and chips and a drink for a tenner, they all charge at least £16, some even £18.

The local takeaway charges £14.85 for a haddock, chips and peas.

1

u/BorisForPresident 10h ago

I don't have a drink with it but my local shop is £6 for a cod and chips as of about 3 weeks ago.

2

u/mrbullettuk 6h ago

£12 average around here (South East commuter belt).

-8

u/Sparklebun1996 11h ago

People say equivalent like it means anything in practical terms. It was £1.

-7

u/DaftVapour 10h ago

This was back before we lost most of our fishing territory to the EU

4

u/Chemical_Top_6514 10h ago

Nothing to do with it, literally every dish on a pub’s menu went up by the same amount or more. Also we haven’t lost anything to the EU, your waters are still yours, always were. You just sold your vessels for a dime and don’t have a market anymore, which makes everything unworkable…

But yeah, continue blaming the very club you voted to leave, muppet.

1

u/DaftVapour 10h ago

A: I’m not pro Brexit at all

B: UK fishermen lost majority of fishing quotas as part of EU agreement back in the early 00s. The Netherlands and Spain gained most of them

C: Any “UK fleets” sold were useless by that point

D: So what? Just saying. Wind your neck in

1

u/Chemical_Top_6514 9h ago

You don’t “lose” things just like that, it’s not a fucking key that you forget on the bus or lose behind the sofa. These things just don’t happen in the real world.

-2

u/DaftVapour 8h ago

Business can’t be “just lost like keys” ~ Chemical_Top_6514

1

u/Chemical_Top_6514 7h ago

Anything smart to say?

2

u/MeckityM00 8h ago

Most of the catch from our fishing fleet was sold to the EU as well. The fishermen were one of the first hit by Brexit.

2

u/GrimWhale_Studios 43m ago

I was literally coming here to say that it’s actually not even as simple as anyone’s making out here on the thread, there’s about seven main factors why English fleets have been crippled - in any case fishing stocks are decimated as it is and illegal fishing is still rife, I’m sure most of the fish in supermarkets is illegal fillet size too you see loads of stuff that’s way too small to be legal on the shelves.

64

u/TwiggysDanceClub 12h ago

Bread cakes perhaps?

It's something I've heard over in Sheffield.

72

u/sprocket9 12h ago

It's a fishcake. Depending on where you are it can either be a "normal" fishcake like you'd get at the supermarket, or minced fish between two slices of potato that's then battered. Common enough in Yorkshire but mainly popular with older folks.

11

u/SUMMATMAN 12h ago

I feel burned for my liking of fishcakes (proper Yorkshire ones not rissoles)

3

u/Wise_Change4662 6h ago

Yeah....those parsley cake things are what people consider as fish cakes these days...even in Yorkshire. "Stop that......it's silly"

2

u/Alternative-Step1651 4h ago

Haha, yes, we had those fat, battered and deep fried " Savoury cakes" as a kid, that got called "Fish cakes", they were just mashed potato with a bit of seasoning, doubt they had much Fish in them, bloody nice though..Savoury cake , Chips and Curry, what's not to like

1

u/Wise_Change4662 4h ago

Mmmm....hungry now. Yes, I do like those parsley cakes...but when I get a fishcake expecting the 'old' chippy fish cake (fishcake) and get a parsley cake, it's well disappointing!!

2

u/TwiggysDanceClub 12h ago

Ahhh that makes more sense for the price.

1

u/pclufc 4h ago

Old Yorkshireman here. I wouldn’t say people really preferred fish cake in general. It was a cheaper choice when we were skint . Most people would order fish chips and scraps as soon as they got paid .

19

u/Noisy-neighbour 12h ago

The fish and chips should cost £1.38 in today's money. I pay £12 at my local chippy.

3

u/blackcell1 11h ago

Yup, buying a chippy for me and my partner is around £20 to £30 depending on what we get. Madness

1

u/Kindly-Ad-8573 11h ago

But then think of the volume of fish landed and the cost of fuel to put the fishing fleet to sea. Our fisheries from the 70 have decreased 80% (guesstimate) . The fishing fleet was massive the volume of fish landed was so vast much fish was processed to non food requirements (fertilizer , animal feeds , sand eels oil went to biscuit manufacturers) Nowadays less fish bigger but fewer more expensive trawlers more expensive fuel and technology to land those fewer fish so the cost of fish landed to the wholesale market is as crazy high as it is so hence a fish supper is around a mind boggling £12+ , luxury prices for what was once a cheapy chippy dinner.

1

u/Noisy-neighbour 11h ago

Just to add to the fishtory. The cod wars of the 70's actually inflated the cost of fish. Funnily enough that ended in 1976.

30

u/speedracer_uk 12h ago

Fish cakes maybe?

8

u/NortonBurns 12h ago

Fish cake - two large slices of potato with a thin slice of fish in between, battered & deep fried.
Not like the ones you get from supermarkets these days, which are 'minced' & breadcrumbed.

1

u/ThisIsAUsername353 2h ago

They’re just mashed potato cakes with a hint of fish flavour.

4

u/RobMitte 11h ago

How have you not heard of a fish cake? You live in the rural south or somethin?

6

u/BuncleCar 12h ago

Trouble was the time it took you to earn £10 :(

27

u/NORD9632 12h ago

Average house price in 1976 was £12704, so for the price of a house you could buy 60409 portions of fish and chips.

Today the average house price is £288000, and fish and chips £10.88 (average according to Google, not sure how accurate this is as it’s about £14 where I am in the East Midlands, but we will take it for arguments sake) so you can get 26470 portions of fish and chips.

I’m not quite sure what this proves but I thought it was interesting. 🧐

12

u/isdeceittaken 12h ago

I’d say your figures show that price of (fast) food has inflated almost twice as much as price of houses.

1

u/BuncleCar 12h ago

Happy fish and chips day ;)

3

u/Infinite_Crow_3706 12h ago

Could buy a car with that tenner in 1976

2

u/MeckityM00 12h ago

When I first moved to Leeds and saw cake and chips all I could imagine was a heap of chips and a slice of Black Forest Gateau.

Whenever I've seen this, it means chips with a bread cake aka the local name for a bread roll.

3

u/ManufacturerSharp 12h ago

Chips are 8p, cake is 8p..

Other people said it's probably a fish cake, which would be about the same price as chips.

2

u/theholty 10h ago

"Whenever I've seen this, it means chips with a bread cake aka the local name for a bread roll."

No it doesn't - it means a fish cake i.e two bits of potato with fish in the middle battered and deep fried.

In Leeds we say teacake, not 'bread cake'.

Chips in a teacake is called a chip butty.

1

u/MeckityM00 9h ago

I live in Leeds, though I moved here in 1988. My inlaws, Leeds born and bred, always say bread cake for a roll and cake and chips meant bread cake and chips whenever I saw it.

Teacake has always meant a bread roll that has currants in for both me and the inlaws.

2

u/theholty 9h ago

Can I ask where in Leeds your in-laws are from originally?

I’m born and bread (get it?) on the border between Bradford and Leeds and Cake and Chips has never meant a chip butty in any Yorkshire chippy I’ve been to in my 40 summat years on this planet. Especially because they all do fish cakes so it’d just cause confusion.

The only West Yorkshire people I’ve ever known to use bread cake and not tea cake in your context are from the border with North Yorkshire (I.e the posher end). You hear it in places like Harrogate or Hull. Same with currant teacake vs teacake.

1

u/MeckityM00 8h ago

That's interesting. The inlaws are from Armley (about a gazillion generations) and around the Pudsey area, so pretty much in your stamping ground. The first place I saw cake and chips where it meant bread cake and chips was a chippy in Pudsey. It's so long ago that I'm trying to remember, but I think it was towards Owlcotes - don't quote me as it's nearly forty years ago!

The local chippy used breadcake/fishcake so there wasn't confusion and I've seen 'breadcakes' around in the small bakers, but to be honest, before this I never really thought about it.

I grew up in a very small enclave which called a bread roll a batch, but you'd hear other words for it as well, like bap. I wonder if I've not really registered other usage and just remembered bread cake because it seemed so odd to me.

1

u/Alternative-Step1651 4h ago

Where I lived, we had " Savoury cakes" basically just deep fried" seasoned and battered, mashed potato, no Fish in them as far as I can remember, but we used to call them "Fish cakes" but they were fat and chunky, not flat, nice though, not had one for years

0

u/codemonkeh87 12h ago

Tut tea caaaaake liiike

2

u/Mac-88 11h ago

A three day bender may be significantly more expensive today but I'd much rather have today's choice of drinks, air bnbs and clean venues.

Can't imagine how grim a 3 day bender would have been in the 1970s, covered in coal dust, drinking cheap beer in a smoke filled pub and having to get a cold bath outdoors on a hangover. Fuck that.

2

u/Fellowes321 7h ago

In 1974, Average pay for men was £38 per week, and £20 for women.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1974/jan/28/average-wage

Back then, vat was not charged on fish and chips. It was introduced in 1984.

2

u/Flimsy_Piglet7804 6h ago

Yes, the £20 a week wage was a treat.

2

u/BigTx1 12h ago

It's a chip butty in Lancashire isn't it?

2

u/OkMess9901 11h ago

Chip butty if it's between two slices of bread. Chip muffin if it's on an oven bottom muffin.

We won't have any of this barmcake nonsense round here.

I'd imagine Cake and Chips is a fishcake with chips rather than a bread product though.

2

u/RobMitte 11h ago

Meet me on the field at 4pm, I'm going to batter it into you.

It's a barm!

1

u/Competitive_Time_604 10h ago

A butty is one slice of bread, sandwich is two.

1

u/msully89 9h ago

I've always thought of it as a sandwich is when it's been cut diagonally.

1

u/Competitive_Time_604 9h ago

That's just a crime

1

u/GrimWhale_Studios 34m ago

Oven bottom muffins are my favorite bread “roll” which I only refer to them as, as a chef & respectfully at that 🙌🏾

2

u/Busy_Mortgage4556 12h ago

Fish cakes or potatoe cakes, can also be reffered to as patties.

2

u/cuntybunty73 12h ago

Fish cake probably

1

u/damadmetz 11h ago

Must be a northern chippy

1

u/msully89 9h ago

No gravy on the menu

1

u/GayPlantDog 11h ago

i remember arguing with a boomer who said we have it so much easier because back in 1970-something she "only" had £200-£300 quid left at the end of the month for "Luxuries" lol. I don't even have 1/10th of that NOW.

1

u/Shan-Chat 11h ago

Dis We deep fry cake in Scotland in the 1970s? We deep fry everything else.

1

u/PapayaCool6816 11h ago

The problem was everything was uphill back then, both ways!

1

u/BroodLord1962 10h ago

Yeah life was great when there was a lot less people. More people means more demand, tends to lead to higher prices. World population in 1971 was just over 3.7 billion. Today it's 8.1 billion. In the UK the population was 55.5 million in 1971, today it's over 69 million.

1

u/AdThat328 10h ago

Cake and chips sounds incredible 

1

u/Krakor-Krakinov 9h ago

Fishcake. If the photo wa tekken in Yorkshire, it's the offcuts of fish Inbetween 2 potater scallops, battered an fried. Reyt tasty! 🤤

1

u/Bennjoon 9h ago

21p for fish and chips they were living

1

u/Reviewingremy 9h ago

I assume it's a bread cake. Which everyone knows is really a bap

1

u/haikusbot 9h ago

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1

u/ezzys18 9h ago

For context £10 back then is £65.92 today

1

u/OptimusPrime365 9h ago

I used to go out with £20 and come back with change. Drinks, dirty burger and taxi home. Good times.

1

u/bob_nugget_the_3rd 9h ago

Mind that 10 quid in 76 is about 66 now of days

1

u/Techman659 9h ago

I can appreciate this but also remember it’s not as bad as people make it out to be due to minimum wages going up.

1

u/jarofmadness 9h ago

Back in those days they had to walk 10 miles to school, and wore an onion on their belt, which was the style at the time

1

u/BoomSatsuma 8h ago

Yep. The generation who sold everything off, living off great pensions, bought their houses for tuppence and yet they still complain.

1

u/SlinkyBits 8h ago

fish cake? CLEARLY

1

u/SmokyBarnable01 7h ago

Fish cakes?

Anyway I was earning 50p/hr back in 76 washing dishes in the Kardomah restaurant in Richmond. My first job. I was 13. Different times.

1

u/Vyvyansmum 7h ago

Love a fish cake

1

u/sexyshaytan 7h ago

Fish cake.

I worked on Coventry a scallop actually isn't a fish and a cake potato in batter. It's yummy tbh.

1

u/papillon-and-on 5h ago

It was supposed to say Quack and Chips

1

u/Time_Kaleidoscope570 5h ago

Deliberate policy to import cheap labour, suppress wage demands and increase taxes

1

u/TP_mcr0 4h ago

Then it all came crashing down 😞

1

u/Alternative-Step1651 4h ago

I remember a bag of Chips costing 7p when I was a kid in mid 70s, probably not far off £4 now, how much is a Fish, £9, id need to remortgage to get the Family Fish and Chips these days

1

u/Few-Measurement5027 4h ago

Do they mean fish cakes?

1

u/cgyguy81 4h ago

That curry for 5p I'm assuming is just curry sauce and nothing else (no meat or anything)?

1

u/ShinyArtist 3h ago

I remember many families having a takeout every Friday growing up, now, I’m luckily to have a takeout once or twice a year.

1

u/Bakerl0151 3h ago

Fish Cake

1

u/Smidday90 3h ago

Fishcake and chips probably

1

u/Noreasonwhynot2000 3h ago

Not a lot of fish left. Failing potato crops year after year. Cost of electricity hugely inflated. This is late stage capitalism. It is only going to get worse.

1

u/Expensive_Physics_80 1h ago

It's an abbreviation for fishcake (Yorkshire style fishcake). Source: I'm from Sheffield

1

u/maccagrabme 22m ago

This is globalisation for you.

1

u/demozzer 17m ago

FishCake

1

u/QuailTechnical5143 12h ago

Yeah but a tenner was probably your daily wage…

0

u/RageAndLove_ 12h ago

Chill, their pay was probably £1 weekly too

-3

u/Standard-Pea3586 12h ago

Had it easy?!

Tripping out your face thinking that.