UK Edition
London's oldest smoked salmon curer receives EU protected status as owner reveals business faced ruin over 2012 Olympics
It has always been a tightly-guarded trade secret among London’s fish merchants.
And now the London Cure - the East End method for smoking salmon - has been awarded the same protected status as champagne, making London the first capital city to be awarded an EU protected food name.
Lance Forman, the owner and chairman of fourth generation smokehouse H Forman & Son, has been awarded the sought-after label for his London Cure smoked salmon.
It comes more than 120 years after his great great grandfather first opened for business at Billingsgate Fish Market, where the now-famous curing process was first perfected.
Congratulating Mr Forman on his achievement, Theresa May said the designation was a “fantastic” endorsement of “London and the UK food industry as a whole”.
Whilst Mr Forman said he was“very proud” to have been awarded protected status, he pointed out that the business had faced ruin only ten years ago, when the London Development Agency attempted to relocate the smokehouse in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
Issued with a compulsory purchase order in 2005, H. Forman & Sons faced being uprooted from Stratford, where it has been situated since 1905, in order to make way for the Olympic Park.
When Mr Forman, who is a former special adviser to Conservative MP Peter Lilley, refused, a fierce dispute ensued - with the 122-year-old business resting in the balance.
Detailing the long-running feud in his book Forman’s Games, Mr Forman revealed how he had fought to secure a fairer deal amid resistance from Ken Livingstone and other “bureaucrats”, whom he accused of being as “slippery as the great-crested newts”.
After five years of negotiations, the LDA agreed to new terms, allowing the business to remain in Stratford whilst moving just 200 metres away to an area known as ‘Fish Island’.
The business has since flourished, with H. Forman & Sons establishing a reputation during the 2012 Games as one of the world’s finest salmon smokehouses.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Mr Forman pointed out that if his business had been forced to move to the LDA’s proposed site in Leyton, the designation--which is limited to the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham--may not have been possible.
“There were three reasons we wanted to stay in the area, and one of them was that this is our heritage,” he added. “During the negotiations we had offers to relocate all over the country, and I said ‘no, no, no, you don’t understand, we need to be in East London.’
“We’ve been in the heart of East London for well over 100 years ago, so making sure we stayed put was crucial.
“We were one of three hundred businesses affected during the Olympic planning, and around 100 of those never made it through. It was really touch and go whether we would survive, because they didn’t give us anytime to move. The whole thing was absolutely catastrophic.
Mr Forman added that the success of his family-run business showed the need for the Government to place small businesses at the heart of its industrial strategy.
“The focus in my view has to be on how to make good businesses in this country thrive,” he continued. “Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, but one of the big problems is that the corporate world appears to suffer increasingly from short-termism.
“Family businesses like ours don’t do that, we are thinking about the next 25 years or so. I think if politicians approached business strategy in the same way, it would be much better for the economy.”
Visiting the factory earlier in the day, Environment Secretary Michael Gove said: "London Cure smoked salmon has been cherished by food-lovers in the capital for generations.
"It will now rightly sit alongside Cornish sardines, Conwy mussels and Whitstable oysters as examples of the world-class produce that uphold our reputation as a great food nation."