Steve Hatt

The slab at 88–90 Essex Road has sold fish since 1895, when Steve Hatt's great-grandfather William Morris set it up; the name over the door belongs to the fourth generation, who took the business from his father in 1985 and gave it the reputation every chef in north London defers to. The shop burnt down in 2007 and was rebuilt around the same trade — whole fish on ice, smoked eel from their own smoker, the queue out the door on Saturdays from seven in the morning. A hundred and thirty years of one family's fish is the Essex Road's best argument against everything else the street has become.