The UK has recently begun to adopt July as National Ice Cream Month. In the USA, the day has been celebrated in the USA since 1984 when Senator Walter Dee Huddleston of Kentucky introduced a resolution to proclaim the month of July 1984 National Ice Cream Month, and the 15th of that month National Ice Cream Day.
Amazingly, then-President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law specifying that July 1984 was National Ice Cream Month. Although only July 1984 was specified, the tradition continued. And many of us don’t need much of an excuse for an ice cream!
While Ice Cream Month and Ice Cream Day have only been around for a few decades, the tasty dessert dates back thousands of years. However, it was only since the mid-19th century that ice cream has been popular in the UK.
Italian entrepreneur Carlo Gatti (1817-1878) is credited with having brought ice cream to the general public while running a chain of restaurants in Victorian London. Gatti’s life reads like a model business success story. After migrating from Ticino (the Italian-speaking Swiss canton) in 1847, Gatti originally worked as a street seller of hot chestnuts. By 1851, he owned a restaurant and had exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London.
Within a few years, he had opened six Ice Warehouses to hold his Ice Wells, including one built in 1862 to house 1500 tons of Norwegian ice on Caledonian Road, near King’s Cross.
The Victorian London website includes a contemporary account of Gatti’s business and how he harvested the ice that made his riches.
‘The Ice Harvest’ from Low-Life Deeps by James Greenwood (1881, first published 1875).
The ice trade of London and the suburbs is in the hands of half a dozen merchants; and the ice-wells or “Shades,” as they are sometimes called, are few and far between. That one to which the northern ice-carters resort is situated in the Caledonian-road, just by the New Cattle Market. Its exterior on ordinary occasions is not very remarkable. It is simply a brick-built, windowless, “round house,” with some sort of machinery that looks like a gigantic mouse-trap surmounting its roof. I have looked into that arctic gulf, and its aspect on a blightingly cold December day is almost enough to turn one’s hair white; a terrible pit, seventy-two feet in depth-the height of a Belgravian mansion, measuring from the area to the attic-and forty-two feet in circumference . . .
I never could have supposed that ice-dealing was so moneymaking a business; and, considering the increasing summer demand for the highly useful article in question, it is a matter of no small surprise that many more adventurers do not embark in the speculation. The price at which the rough ice is bought ranges from 15d. the barrow-load to 8s. the pair-horse van load; which is, as was explained to me, an average of 2s. a load, “take them all round;” but the easiest way of reckoning will be to take the fact that the well of 3,000 ton capacity takes 7,000 loads to fill and that the average price is 2s. a load. So 3,000 tons of rough ice costs £700 carted and delivered . . . We draw largely on Norway. Mr. Carlo Gatti, of the Islington well, is a mighty man of ice. At home he farms the New River and the Regent’s Canal, and sends out his own carts and barges to get in the crops; and besides this he has ships on the sea constantly trading with regions which are almost perpetually icy, and which yield a pure block ice dearer than the rough by a shilling the hundredweight.
Close by the Caledonian Road site at Battlebridge Basin, in New Wharf Road, is Gatti’s original ice warehouse, which still exists and now functions as the London Canal Museum. The museum houses a whole section dedicated to Gatti, the international ice trade, as well as ice cream and its social history.
Carlo Gatti eventually returned to Switzerland, but his ice business remained with his daughter in London. The company developed over the years, eventually folding in 1981.
The London Canal Museum welcomes visitors every day, except Mondays. For researchers, they hold original archives and artefacts, mainly relating to Carlo Gatti and the Regent’s Canal. In July this year, they plan a weekend of Gatti Celebrations.
How will you be celebrating Ice Cream Month? Please share your photos and plans with us on our Facebook and Twitter pages!
Sources
- The London Canal Museum https://www.canalmuseum.org.uk/
- Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – Low-Life Deeps, by James Greenwood, 1881 [first published 1875] – The Ice Harvest (URL http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications4/low-13.htm accessed 22 July 2022)
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