A north London academic reads about the fourteen-pound sandwich and conducts a small field study on what a lecturer’s salary will actually buy in central London
Monday, 12 October 2026. A seminar room in Bloomsbury, twenty minutes before my second-year students arrive, a paper cup of tea that cost three pounds forty, a radiator that has not worked since the coalition government, 9.10am.
An Empirical Question
As a political theorist, I am trained to distrust anecdote. Anecdote is what people offer when they have no data. So when I read the London Prat’s report on London, the city that charges fourteen pounds for a sandwich and gets away with it, I decided to conduct a small empirical study, as one does when one has a doctorate and an unhealthy relationship with lunch. My methodology was simple. I would walk from my office in Bloomsbury to the nearest sandwich shops and record the price of the most ordinary sandwich available. My sample size was seven shops. My budget was my dignity.
The results were alarming. The cheapest sandwich I found was a cheese and pickle at five pounds ninety, sold with the apologetic air of a shop that knows it is the last of its kind. The most expensive was a focaccia containing burrata, heritage tomato and an ingredient described as a whisper of basil, at thirteen pounds fifty. I asked the young man at the counter what a whisper of basil was. He said it was one leaf. I paid thirteen pounds fifty for one leaf and a sense of shame. I am including the receipt in my next grant application.
The Seminar
My second-years are studying theories of justice this term. Today we are discussing distribution: who gets what, and why. I opened the seminar by holding up the receipt for the burrata focaccia and asking them whether a just society could permit a sandwich of this price. The discussion was the liveliest of the term. One student, a Rawlsian, argued that the sandwich could be justified only if it benefited the least advantaged sandwich eater. Another, a libertarian from Surrey, argued that the market had freely priced the leaf of basil and that I had freely chosen to buy it. A third simply asked if she could have the rest of it. I gave her the rest of it. That, I said, is redistribution.
The trouble with teaching political theory in London is that the students know the theory perfectly and cannot afford to live near the university. Several of them commute from Zone 5. One lives in a flat in Stratford with six other people and a landlord who communicates exclusively by WhatsApp voice note. When I explain to them that housing is a question of political economy, they look at me with the weary patience of people who have already done the fieldwork.
What A Lecturer Earns
I will not disclose my salary in a diary, partly because it is undignified and partly because it would make you weep. I will say only that a senior lecturer in London earns enough to buy approximately two burrata sandwiches a day, provided she forgoes rent, transport, heating and the cat. I have done the calculations. If I ate the fourteen-pound sandwich every working day, it would cost more than three thousand pounds a year. That is roughly the amount by which my pay has fallen behind inflation since I began my doctorate. In other words, I have already paid for the sandwich. I simply never received it.
The Politics Of Lunch
Every London election is fought on housing, transport and crime, and yet the real political question in this city is lunch. Lunch is where the cost of living becomes personal. You can ignore a rent statistic. You cannot ignore a man in a green apron telling you that a sandwich costs more than a train ticket to Brighton. A colleague in economics, who models such things for a living, told me over a twelve-pound salad that London lunch prices are the most honest economic indicator in the country. Inflation reports are revised, he said. The sandwich is not.
My suggestion is that every minister, before announcing a new economic policy, should be required to buy lunch in central London with their own money, in cash, without an assistant. The policy should then be adjusted according to how they feel afterwards. I suspect we would see a sudden and dramatic interest in the cost of living.
Packed Lunch As Resistance
After my field study, I have resolved to bring my own sandwiches. This is not merely a financial decision. It is a political act, in the tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers, who also objected to the concentration of wealth, although admittedly not specifically to focaccia. Tomorrow I will arrive at work with a cheese sandwich in a plastic box, made in my Kentish Town kitchen for approximately ninety pence. I will eat it in the seminar room in full view of my students, as a demonstration of practical political economy. Hobbes the cat will have the crusts. He is a strict Hobbesian about crusts. Life, for a crust in our house, is nasty, brutish and short.
Closing Notes
The students have arrived, damp and tired, carrying coffees that cost more than my first car. I have hidden the receipt, because I have decided it is too upsetting for a nine o’clock seminar. We will discuss Rawls. We will discuss Nozick. We will discuss whether a society is just if a young person with a first-class degree cannot afford a sandwich within a mile of her university. My students will argue brilliantly. And at the end, as always, they will ask me the only question that matters. Doctor Moran, they will say. Is it on the exam? Yes, I will tell them. It is on every exam. It is called London.