The New Chinatowns
How the Sinification of UK higher education has transformed Chinatowns in the UK. Words by Barclay Bram. Photographs by Chan Yang Kim.
Welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. In this essay, Barclay Bram looks at how the massive influx in recent years of Chinese international students has produced new Chinatowns across the length and breadth of the UK, and how a simple change in university policy has fundamentally altered what British towns and cities look like, and what we eat.
You can read the rest of the project here:
Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various
From his corner of the restaurant, Ma Teng can look across the dining room, surveying the steady flow of customers into his business. With a subtle turn of the head, he can peer through the floor-to-ceiling windows and out at London’s Chinatown. Even at 5pm on a Wednesday in February – when we sit to eat – it is already heaving with people. We’re in the flagship of Jinli, a restaurant chain that, over the last decade, has spread across the UK. Today, it has seven branches countrywide, and specialises in Sichuanese food, with an emphasis on 家常菜 – home-style cooking.
Martin (as he prefers to be known) started off working for Yin Fei, the founder of the restaurant, eventually taking over the restaurant’s ownership from him. At the entrance to Jinli, he proudly displays all the awards he has won. There are awards from Chinese platforms like Dazhong Dianping, Xiao Hongshu and HungryPanda. Chinese state television broadcaster CCTV-2 has named his grilled fish the most popular Sichuanese dish in the UK. According to the Chinese Student and Scholars Association (CSSA), Jinli has been rated the most popular with Chinese exchange students for four years in a row. This, too, is evidenced by an award on the wall.
But despite all of these successes, the outlook from Martin’s vantage point is not good. ‘I want people to understand exactly what we’re going through at the moment,’ he tells me. He is frank about the challenges his restaurants face: ‘Brexit, the war in Ukraine, price shocks from all kinds of geopolitical instability,’ he says, rattling off a litany of recent bad-news headlines. But there’s a bigger problem. ‘We’re caught in the middle of two bad economies,’ he says. Britain’s economy is stagnant. But so is China’s. ‘The students,’ he says, looking forlornly out of the window, ‘they don’t have money any more.’
The impact that the mass migration of Chinese students has had on UK food culture should be obvious to anyone who has seen HungryPanda delivery drivers zip through red lights, who has marvelled at the diversity and number of bubble tea stores, or who has noticed the upscaling of Asian supermarkets in recent years. It has propelled the fortunes of people like Martin, who rode the wave of Chinese students seeking a taste of home. Martin targets cities with a solid number of affluent Chinese students, but where the competition isn’t as fierce as in cities like Manchester or Birmingham. ‘In Exeter, we have no competition. Our brand is much stronger than everyone else’s, and no one is there to drive our prices down.’
This mass migration has allowed regional Chinese cooking to proliferate outside of London, particularly in small university towns. But it has also done something else – it has exploded the very concept of Chinatown. With university towns around the UK catering to this influx of new money and seeing their high streets thrive, it begs an important question: who needs a Chinatown?