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Does ‘balti’, the Birmingham-created curry named after the steel bowl in which the dish is cooked and served, count as part of the UK’s intangible heritage? Chefs in Birmingham certainly think so and have launched a campaign to have balti officially designated as a component of Britain’s living heritage inventory under the scheme launched by UNESCO and the UK government earlier this year.
Chef Shab Hussain is behind the campaign: he now runs Shababs, a restaurant on Ladypool Road in south-east Birmingham that his father opened in 1987, and one of only a handful remaining in Birmingham that still make an authentic balti curry. From a peak of popularity in the 1990s, when there were scores of such restaurants in the so-called ‘Balti Belt’ of Sparkhill and Moseley, the number has declined to just 20 in the city today.
The invention of the dish is attributed to Pakistani chef Mohammed Arif, whose customers wanted a quickly served meal after pub closing time. Arif collaborated with a Sikh metal engineer, Tara Singh, who worked for one of the nearby steel manufacturers, to design the thin, pressed-steel bowl that could conduct the heat needed to cook the dish at speed. They named it ‘balti’ from the Urdu word for bucket.
Balti still features on many restaurant menus, but it is not the genuine article, says Hussain: ‘they cook it in a frying pan before dumping it into a bowl,’ he told The Guardian. ‘Balti has become a catch-all term for anything vaguely resembling curry, from curry-flavoured snacks to mass produced bottled sauces,’ he added.
A long list of other potential culinary designations has been drawn up, with the case being made for jellied eel, haggis, shortbread, bara brith, Welsh cakes, laverbread (seaweed), Caerphilly cheese, Eccles cakes, Staffordshire oatcakes, crumpets, and Irish stew among the traditional foods under consideration for the UK. Meanwhile, the baguette, kimchi, and traditional Neapolitan pizza have been nominated internationally. Another high profile campaign, led by Yorkshire-based makers, is seeking official recognition for the ‘Great British Pie’ in its various forms, stating that pies are ‘a fundamental pillar of cultural and culinary history, reflecting centuries of tradition, regional identity, and social gatherings’.
The Museum of Edible Earth
Food foraging was recently given a new meaning with the temporary installation, in London’s Somerset House, of the Museum of Edible Earth – another addition to Sherds’ list of quirky museum collections. Visitors were invited to explore ‘geophagy’, the practice of eating earth for health, ritual, and gastronomic benefits.
Cabinets mounted on the walls of the museum displayed some 600 samples of soil from 44 countries, while a communal tasting table in the centre of the room offered visitors the chance to taste edible clay, chalk, and mineral-rich earths from the collection, offering a ‘rare sensory encounter with soil’.
On a more serious note, the exhibition made clear that some of these soils serve as medicinal supplements in various parts of the world when powdered and added to food, providing a valuable source of calcium, potassium, iron, magnesium, copper, and zinc – it seems that eating dirt is not such a strange practice after all.
Secret layers
Dr James Wright’s entertaining book called Historic Building Mythbusting (reviewed in CA 415) explores the origins of folkloric stories about ancient structures, including the enduring idea that Britain is riddled with secret tunnels, ostensibly built to enable monks to escape their confines
for a night on the town, or to facilitate smuggling, or as an escape route from besieged castles.
Not every secret tunnel story is based on fantasy, however, as the BBC reported recently in the case of the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham. Intrigued by stories passed down the generations concerning the subterranean passageways rumoured to exist beneath their village, a group of residents set up the Bloxham Underground Tunnel Society in 2024 to pin down the truth.
Their first port of call was an elderly resident who remembered seeing a tunnel entrance hidden behind a doorway in the garden of his boyhood home. When members of the Tunnel Society called at the house in 2025, they found that the door led to a long-forgotten chamber of which the current resident was wholly unaware. Another tunnel was then discovered by accident when the ground caved in beneath the footings that a builder was digging for his garage, revealing a tunnel 40m (130ft) long.
Both tunnels proved to be part of a large network of underground passageways with many branches, and in clearing rubble and earth to gain access, the Society’s members retrieved Victorian tins, bottles, and shoes, as well as a possibly medieval red-deer skull, which is now being radiocarbon dated. Historic graffiti was found on the tunnel walls, including initials and a double V symbol of potentially late-medieval date (standing for Virgo Virginum, Virgin of Virgins, taken from the liturgical antiphon to the Virgin Mary), often used as an apotropaic symbol to ward off evil spirits.
It is likely that the tunnels represent early modern quarrying to extract the marlstone from which many of the local buildings are constructed, but alternative theories have proved to be a lively topic of village conversation. Some favour the idea that they are linked to the Romano-British settlement and cemetery uncovered near Bloxham’s Tadmarton Road in 1929, while others prefer the suggestion that they were dug to provide a hiding place and escape route for persecuted monks during the Dissolution or for Catholic priests hiding during the Reformation.
Gas holders and cooling towers
Recent issues of CA have featured the history of gas holders (CA 423) and power station cooling towers (CA 431), both of them once-familiar, but now rare, forms of industrial heritage. In further news on both fronts, Southwark Council has announced plans to turn the spaces within the two surviving gasholder frames of the Old Kent Road gasworks into an outdoor wild swimming pool with a natural reed-based filtration system for keeping the water clean and fresh.
The newly landscaped gasworks will be known as Livesey Park and will have a cafe, shop, and changing rooms to help pay for the pool’s upkeep, a scheme that Southwark Council says is ‘unlike anything else seen in Europe’. Once the largest gasworks in the world, the Old Kent Road structures were built by engineer Sir George Livesey in the late 1800s and have been disused since 1953.
Less good is the news that the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, which closed in September 2024, will definitely be demolished. Hopes had been raised that the cooling towers would be conserved as part of plans to convert the site into a large-scale electrolytic hydrogen production plant, but contracts have now been put in place for the demolition of all the existing structures over the next four years, clearing the 273ha site (675 acres), which occupies a prime location close to the M1, the expanding East Midlands airport, and a proposed HS2 station.
Organ tuning and climate change
Notes left by organ tuners in churches and chapels throughout the UK have proved to be an unexpected source of data for studying climate change. In a paper published in Buildings and Cities (https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.671), Yangang Xing, Andrew Knight, and Bruno Bingley explain that organ tuners all over the country have been in the habit of adding weather observations to records of their church visits. Documenting the temperature and humidity inside the building when an organ was last tuned helps the next tuner who visits. For example, an organ previously tuned at, say, 16∞C will sound perceptibly different if tuned at 20∞C.
The authors describe the data they have gleaned from just 18 red-covered notebooks of the many examples tucked away in organ lofts and vestries around the country. Andrew Knight, himself an organist, says he only recently appreciated the value of the notebooks that he used to browse before playing at weddings or between hymns.
These revealed that churches are getting warmer even in the summer months when heating systems are turned off: the average summer temperature for urban churches in the organ books sampled had risen from 17.2∞C during the late 1960s to 19.8∞C today. This reflects what organ tuners themselves say they are experiencing – that rising temperatures are affecting the wooden and metallic components, especially of older instruments. Newer ones tend to be built of materials that are less severely affected by swings in temperature and humidity.
