Text 1: While the town sleeps, by Imogen Price

An original contemporary magazine feature.

At twenty minutes to three in the morning, the high street is empty except for a fox inspecting a litter bin. Behind the bakery window, however, four people are moving so quickly that they seem to be living in a different time zone. Trays rattle. Scales blink. A mixer turns with the steady growl of distant traffic.

Asha Karim has worked nights here for twelve years. She presses one finger into a mound of dough and watches the dent rise slowly. “Still half asleep,” she says, covering it again. I had imagined that baking on this scale would be a matter of buttons and timers, but Asha distrusts anything that claims to do all the thinking. “A machine can count minutes,” she tells me. “It can’t tell you how the dough feels.”

The work is precise, but it is also relentlessly physical. Leo, the newest baker, lifts flour sacks almost as tall as his body. Marta slides loaded trays into the ovens, stepping back from the burst of heat that reddens her face. Nobody is still for more than a few seconds. When a tub of seeds tips across the floor, there is a brief storm of sweeping, mock accusation and laughter; then the team returns to its practised rhythm.

By four o’clock, the room smells of warm grain and caramelised sugar. By five, racks of loaves stand in neat rows, their crusts shining under the lights. The bakers, meanwhile, are powdered with flour and damp with sweat. Asha cuts open one loaf, studies the web of holes inside and nods. This small gesture is the nearest thing to celebration.

At half past six, the first customer taps on the locked door. He points hopefully at the bread. Asha points firmly at the clock. Ten minutes later, the shop opens and the silent street fills with people who see only the finished loaves. “Everyone thinks bread begins at breakfast,” Asha says as she carries out another tray. “Ours began yesterday.”

Text 2: A night below the street, by A Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report, published in 1864, a correspondent visits a bakehouse beneath a busy city street.

We descended by a narrow stair into a chamber so low that a tall man might touch its ceiling. Although the winter air above was bitter, the heat below struck us like the breath of midsummer. Two ovens burned at the farther wall, and the small panes of glass had been clouded by steam until no glimpse of the night remained.

Eight men and one boy laboured in this cellar. Some kneaded the heavy dough upon long tables; others bore boards of loaves to the ovens or drew them out again with wooden poles. Their shirts clung to them, and flour had settled upon their hair and eyebrows, giving the youngest among them the appearance of old men. There was little conversation. The scrape of boards and the dull thud of dough supplied the only music of their employment.

Mr Pritchard, the master baker, moved from table to table with a watch in his hand. Nothing escaped him. A loaf judged too small was returned without a word; a row set down unevenly was straightened at once. The boy, Samuel, had begun work at six the previous evening and would remain until the morning delivery was complete. When asked whether he was tired, he looked first towards his master and then replied that he was accustomed to it.

Yet exhaustion had not made these men careless. Each portion was divided with remarkable exactness, and every oven was filled at precisely the proper moment. Shortly before dawn, hundreds of loaves stood ready in baskets, while the workers who had made them leaned for a moment against the walls.

Above us, the city was beginning to wake. Carts rolled over the very ceiling of this hidden room, carrying bread towards households whose occupants would never see the hands that produced it. We emerged into the cold morning with admiration for the skill below, but with little appetite for a comfort purchased by such long and stifling labour.

The writers visit bakeries in which people work through the night.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the bakers and their working conditions
• how the writers present the work taking place in each bakery

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