The pursuit of happiness

Frank Godfrey butcher's shop in Islington has been serving Londoners for over 100 years. Inside, it is a small, modest shop without a flashy display, and if Islington were not one of England's most expensive areas, with a higher per-square-metre covering of the rich and famous than almost anywhere else, you would never guess Tony and Cherie Blair drop in for supplies of calves' liver or food writer Nigel Slater shops there daily.

The route to the shop from the nearest tube station leads past Arsenal's old Highbury stadium, which sits in a quiet residential street. It is defunct now, replaced by the truly impressive Emirates stadium just a couple of miles down the road. But when Highbury first opened its turnstiles in 1913, Frank Godfrey was relatively new to the area, having moved from Lincolnshire with his young family to start his business in 1905.

PROUD HERITAGE

Fast-forward more than a century and the shop is run by Chris Godfrey, the great-grandson of Frank. Proud of the family heritage, Chris describes butchery as "in our blood" - in fact, his 12-year-old son's ambition is to take over from his dad one day.

Chris' brothers, Jerry and Phillip, look after the catering and manufacturing side of the business at one of the family's newer additions, a 5,000sq ft factory in Finsbury Park, built in 1985. The Godfrey brothers' father, Peter (Frank's grandson), has retired from butchery, but he still works for the business, paying the bills from the office and chasing customers for money.

Yet despite remaining in the family, the history of the business is not straightforward. Frank was successful and his one shop gradually grew to four, one for each of his four sons to inherit. The sons, in turn, left their part of the business to their children, which fragmented it into numerous chunks, run by increasingly distant relatives.

supermarket bite

Then, as the hard times of the 1980s started to bite, with supermarkets swallowing up small retailers whole, more and more of the extended Godfrey family decided to sell up. "We were told there was no future in it and it was a complete waste of time," says Chris.

He and his brothers decided to carry on, though, and slowly bought up all the splinters of the business. They condensed the four shops down to one, then built their factory, which does a solid trade with some of London's finest restaurants.

It is unusual to see a meat-processing factory in the centre of a city and the brothers have had to fight off developers, who are keen to turn the small industrial estate, where they churn out tonnes of sausages and sides of beef, into yet another block of modern flats. But after trading for over a century, the family is well-used to dealing with everything the world can throw at them.

"It was a hard slog with the supermarkets," says Chris. "We probably had 10-15 years of just fighting with them. The meat industry changed dramatically. In the '70s, when I was a kid, three superstores opened around London. Everyone was all doom and gloom about these new superstores, but now they are everywhere. Now, though, they are like a big machine eating themselves; they are coming round to the high street, it's just incredible."

To illustrate, Chris points out a boarded-up shop, about 100m from his store. He says it is being converted into a Tesco Metro. "It has always been a fight," he says. His policy now is to offer simple, but excellent cuts of meat and very few added-value products. He used to sell lots of cheese, a variety of pies, lots of marinated products. Not any more. "I class a nice pork chop or a lamb chop as a product. A nicely cut pork chop is a product, but sometimes, these days, you find it with a pineapple chunk on top.

"What makes us different from other butchers is we tend to do just butchery. There is a shortage of people who actually do that, as people are diversifying and opening glorified delis with a bit of meat attached to them. But most of my customers are foodies and want to buy meat. Most of the stuff here comes from farms I know. It all comes in a whole carcase and is broken up traditionally."

This approach goes against the grain of popular thought, which emphasises diversification, diversification, diversification. "I don't think I can do everyone else's job better," argues Chris, who is in the unusual position of having a cheese shop, a greengrocers and a delicatessen all on the same street as his shop. "I believe people should do what they're good at, concentrate on their strengths and not try and please everybody. There are shops that do quite well by the whole package, the food hall. But it's not what we do," he says.

identity intact

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