British puddings have spent years being written off as school-dinner leftovers. Not any more. Chefs and bakers across the UK are putting traditional sweets back at the centre of the menu, and Condé Nast Traveller UK has mapped 24 regional desserts worth travelling for – from centuries-old classics to deep-fried oddities.
A few standouts for pudding pilgrims. In the Derbyshire town of Bakewell, The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop has been baking its famous tart – said to have been invented by accident at the White Horse Inn by one Mrs Greaves – for over a century. The combination of crumbly pastry, frangipane, icing and jam is best eaten where it was born.
Banoffee pie has a birthplace too: the village of Jevington in East Sussex, where a blue plaque marks the former Hungry Monk restaurant and the 14th-century building where chefs Nigel Mackenzie and Ian Dowding created the banana-and-caramel classic in 1971. A modern riff at The Hart in Marylebone has recently become a menu magnet in its own right.
Wales contributes bara brith, the 'speckled bread' sweetened with tea-steeped dried fruit – a loaf that travelled with Welsh emigrants to Patagonia, where it survives as torta negra. In Caernarfon you can order it buttered with a pot of tea at Caffi Gwynant, while at Hywel Griffith's Michelin-starred Beach House on the Gower peninsula it appears as a soufflé.
Scotland's contribution is deliberately outrageous: the deep-fried Mars bar, supposedly invented at the Carron Fish Bar in Stonehaven in 1992 and still available there. A 2004 study in The Lancet found 22 per cent of Scottish chippies sold them – and fans swear they eat like a hot, molten cookie.
Elsewhere on the list: the apple crumble, a wartime invention now given a chic makeover at Humble Crumble in Borough Market; the Battenberg, elevated at The Wolseley in Piccadilly, where it takes the kitchen three days to make; sticky Chelsea buns at Fitzbillies in Cambridge, a century-old institution; bread-and-butter pudding with a brûlée-style top at The Devonshire in Soho; and Eccles cakes with Lancashire cheese at St John. London's Chinatown even gets a look-in with liu sha bao, the molten salted-egg custard buns at Royal China, plus baklava along Green Lanes and at Mehmet Efendi 1953.
The appeal for travellers is simple: these are desserts with actual addresses. Each one anchors a day out – a Peak District town, a South Downs walk, a Welsh café stop, a Scottish chippy by the sea. If you're planning a food-focused trip around Britain, this list doubles as a route map: pick three or four puddings, plot them geographically, and you've got yourself a very sweet itinerary.
