South of the river on Tower Bridge Road sits M. Manze, widely credited as the oldest surviving pie and mash shop in London — and it's still dishing out plates exactly as it has for over a century. The shop opened its doors in 1902, when Italian immigrant Michele Manze turned his family's recipe into what became a citywide institution. Today it's the last of the original Manze shops still trading, a Grade II-listed interior all green tiles, marble counters and old photographs, complete with the family portraits still hanging above the till.
What do you actually eat here? The classic order is a plate of minced beef pies with mash and liquor — the parsley sauce that's the make-or-break element of any proper pie, mash and liquor experience. Traditionalists add a side of jellied or stewed eels, a centuries-old staple of working-class London that predates the pie shop boom. Everything is made on site to the original recipes, and prices stay firmly in budget territory: a pie, mash and liquor plate comes in well under a fiver.
The shop is very much a living piece of social history rather than a museum piece. Pie, mash and eel shops spread across Victorian London as cheap, filling food for dockers and market workers, and at their peak there were well over a hundred of them. Numbers have thinned dramatically, which makes an original survivor like Manze — with its preserved tiled walls and its place in the Bermondsey streetscape — worth seeking out between stops on any south London wander. Tower Bridge, Borough Market and the South Bank are all within easy reach if you want to build a walk around lunch.
It's a proper local experience too. You'll find market traders, cabbies and students squeezed along the same counter, and the staff still call everyone 'darlin'. Cash-friendly, quick and unfussy, it's the antidote to a £30 restaurant lunch — and arguably a more memorable one. If you're curious about old London food culture beyond the tourist trail, a plate here tells you more than most guided walks.
