Training | 2009.07.07
Only gentrification can avert the ice-cream van's doom | Joe Moran
Frozen out by the health lobby and picky eaters, these social pariahs must fight back with Puccini and organic offerings
It\'s the startling centrepiece of Banksy\'s new exhibition in Bristol : a burnt-out, graffitied ice-cream van with deflated tyres and a ghostly jingle. I don\'t know much about art, but I think I know what Banksy is getting at. There is something about the utopian promise that the ice-cream van used to represent for children of the 70s and 80s that makes us inclined to see its sad demise as a parable for our times.
In 1974, just as I was developing my own Pavlovian response to the tinny sound of Greensleeves, the architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote a much-loved New Society essay, Sundae painters. It celebrated the ice-cream van as a vernacular artwork, a "tutti-frutti of detached motifs and flourishes" that tapped effortlessly into cultural trends, which were then going through a "Rocket-Baroque phase" influenced by the space race. These mobile artworks were all the more impressive for Banham because they were created by unheralded artists making aesthetic decisions on the spot, like the artisan masons of the middle ages, with no need for designers or branding experts.
Banham wrote this in the halcyon days of the ice-cream van, when there were about 20,000 van owners in Britain – now there are less than a quarter of that number, and even in the middle of this heatwave you will be lucky to see one. The problem isn\'t just the reliance on seasonal and sunny trade, but the swamping of the ice-cream market by the supermarkets. Owning an ice-cream van has come to be seen as the nadir, the symbolic bottom rung of the business ladder, a point starkly made in the title of Duncan Bannatyne \'s rags-to-riches autobiography, Anyone can do it: From an ice-cream van to Dragons\' Den .
The decline of the ice-cream van is a familiar tale of gentrification and social marginalisation. These vans typically sell the soft-serve ice-cream loved by the Angel Delight generation of children. In one of those stories told largely for their allegorical content, whipped ice-cream was supposedly invented by Margaret Thatcher when she was a young industrial chemist working for Lyons. She discovered a method of injecting more air into the ice-cream, making it easily freezable as well as using less ingredients. What a wonderful metaphor for the "free" market, getting us to pay for air! But actually Mrs Thatcher was only a junior member of a team that did the initial research on "fat extension"; I\'m not sure we can pin Mr Whippy on her.
In any case, the metaphor doesn\'t work. Mr Whippy did badly out of Thatcherism, which created a highly sophisticated, culturally literate consumerism full of invisible class distinctions. The 1980s thus saw a return to the traditional, thicker ice-creams sold as premium brands, with exotic varieties such as Mocha Almond Fudge , hardly any air and loads of butterfat. A soothing solution to the strains of modern life: baby food with esoteric flavourings. The liquid equivalent is the smoothie, the meal-in-a-glass for those wishing to avoid the chore of peeling fruit, chewing it and dispensing with the remains.
Meanwhile, the old-fashioned vans have been targeted by health campaigners and local authorities, which have stopped them operating near school gates, or set up ice-cream exclusion zones in shopping streets. The effect is to hit dying businesses run by lone men in vans, while the supermarkets carry on selling choc ices in value packs. As Banham noted, ice-cream vans have always been social pariahs, disliked for their visual vulgarity and noise pollution, and now the anti-obesity agenda has simply confirmed their plebeian status.
At music festivals – the new bourgeois-bohemian summer ritual – there always seems to be a lone, forlorn-looking ice-cream van with no customers. The longest queues are for hippyish-looking entrepreneurs selling smoothies and speciality teas, with homemade banners and audacious prices that somehow manage to convey a cool, non-corporate image. This boutique economy, which subtly appeals to both our social consciences and our unconscious class allegiances, is one of the more unlikely legacies of Thatcherism. Meanwhile the jingle-jangle of O Sole Mio will be soon as extinct a street sound as "rag\'n\'bone" and "milko". For anyone of my age, for whom ice-cream chimes will always announce the glorious arrival of summer as surely as screeching swifts returning from Africa, this is a shame.
So here is my suggestion: gentrified ice-cream vans. Stressed-out professionals are as likely as children to buy comfort food on impulse – just look at those overpriced individual cheesecakes in supermarket chill cabinets. If I owned an ice-cream van, I would paint over the garish colours and replace them with something more understated – a nice, cool pistachio, perhaps – then drive round playing Puccini and selling home-made, organic ice-cream with Ben & Jerry-style flavourings . If that\'s not catnip to all those tired, time-poor office workers crashing out in front of Celebrity Masterchef, I don\'t know what is. In fact, any struggling ice-cream vendor who happens to be reading this is welcome to scoop up my idea and take it into the Dragons\' Den, where I am sure the former ice-cream king of Stockton-on-Tees could be persuaded to invest.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/30/ice-cream-van-business
