Bread fresh from the oven. Step inside the blue frontage of Kentish Town’s Bread by Bike and that’s the first thing you notice, the smell: rich and warm and comforting. The ovens still humming. Then it’s all the loaves on display: racks of them, most steaming slightly on the shelves, sitting next to vast bags of flour. Focaccia too. It’s a carb-lover’s paradise, complete with thick slabs of Basque cheesecake and endless pastries. Inside it is simple, understated: plain wooden tables, clear white walls, a blackboard, a little in the way of art. What they bake is why people come.
It’s impossible to deny that London’s bakeries are having a moment — sometimes it’s hard to walk down a street without seeing a new one, usually with a Birkenstock-clad crowd waiting, patiently and impatiently, to get inside — but Bread By Bike feels special. It is somewhere locals treasure — a far cry from the Gail’s that in some parts of town get picketed.
Perhaps that’s because it’s been around for almost a decade, slowly building its regulars. The brand began in 2016 when Andy Strang, trying to finish his dissertation for his physics PhD, found himself hopelessly distracted by baking. He spotted a gap in the market — only in London — for hand-baked sourdough breads delivered, as the name says, by bike.
World-beating Hippy sourdough
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It began with deliveries to friends, which proved popular enough for Strang began to branch out. He found success: so much so that Bread by Bike opened their store in 2017, followed by the adjoining café in 2021, for which the money was crowdfunded (the names of contributors are memoralised on a “backer’s wall”).
Sourdough, no surprise, started things. But it helped that the market seemed to be changing: pubs are struggling particularly now, but it was bad in 2016 too. And so the bakery and then café easily found a home.
Since then, its success seems only to have grown. Perhaps it’s part of the slow living trend: more than ever before, people are paying more attention to what they eat, where it’s come from and how it’s been made.
“I think it’s been kind of going that way for a good while now, and I think that it’s almost just becoming a norm in a way,” says Dale Strickland, who joined in 2020 and took over full-time from Strang in 2024. “Coming to a bakery, it’s an affordable kind of thing to do when you don’t feel like you can head out for an expensive lunch. And I think people are just turning on to the fact that real bread is better.”
Grilled banana bread, whipped mascarpone and a drizzle of espresso draws crowds
It’s real bread that takes time to get right. Here things start at 3am, which is when the team arrive and get the ball rolling, crafting the bakery’s signature sourdough loaves — including their best-selling Hippy sourdough, which was a winner at the World Bread Awards in 2019. Of his team, Strickland says: “We take on a lot of people from low skilled (backgrounds). They’re either changing career or maybe they’re a home baker. We have quite a strong training programme.”
It’s training that is invaluable given the present crisis with hospitality recruitment. And Strickland needs his team firing on all cylinders: the shop opens at 8am, running till 4pm — and despite the name, it does far more than bread. There’s an ever-changing café menu with ambitious items like kohlrabi, chicory and blood orange salads, or Hong Kong-style French toast topped with kaya jam. Grilled banana bread with whipped mascarpone and a drizzle of espresso is already proving popular; they’re experimenting with a twice baked pineapple and coconut croissant; one for piña colada fans.
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It’s both Bread by Bike’s fail-safe sourdough and this bold experimental streak that has built a fan base that goes well beyond its Kentish Town neighbourhood. Some come from as far away as Bedfordshire. “You do get people coming in and saying, ‘I’ve come all the way from such and such,’ and they’ll buy five rye loaves and go and freeze them,” Strickland says with a smile. “So, yeah, we do have our fan club.”
Any celebs? Yes, he says. Some aren’t a secret — Yotam Ottolenghi gave the spot a shout-out during his latest interview with the Standard – but others are, and Strickland refuses to be drawn on them. “There’s quite a few,” he says. “But I probably shouldn’t name drop.”
Perhaps these are the customers that still take advantage of the bike deliveries, which continue even as most customers these days come to the shop in person, all the better to make impulse purchases. Either way, business is booming. “I actually live towards the Crouch End area and I often get people saying, ‘Why aren’t you opening here?’” Strickland says.
Well, why not? He’s coy: the answer is they’d like to expand, but “not in the next year. Right now, we’re focused on being the best we can where we are.” That, and the challenges of supplying their bread to 30-plus wholesale locations around London — including another personal favourite, Crick’s Café in Archway — means that Brecknock Road is likely to remain the only site for now. Still, Strickland feels like there’s no huge rush.
In the meantime, I’m hoping for a return of Bread by Night, the infrequent supper club that see the café’s interior given over to tapered candles and small plates where strangers sit side by side on the long tables to eat. But whatever happens next, BBB is still going strong, and so is the sourdough starter. “We haven’t killed our starter since the start,” Strickland says. “It’s been going for a good while.” Long may it continue.