Food and Drink

Top 10 places for seaside fish & chips are all in the south, controversial research claims

The top 10 seaside places in the UK to eat fish & chips all lie south of the Watford Gap, controversial new research has suggested.

Despite seaside towns such as Whitby, Scarborough and Seahouses laying claim to some of the best chippies in the country, you have to skirt around the south coast to find the best Blighty has to offer.

A new study from Betway has crowned Brighton as the best place to visit to enjoy a chippy on the beach, as its highest-rated chippy, RYBKA (the fish likes to swim), is only 0.38km away from the nearest seaside.

Newquay is in second place, while Rick Stein’s Padstow claims third place for Chip Ahoy, which is a full kilometre from the seaside.

Making up the top five are St Ives in fourth place and Portsmouth in fifth position, whose highest-rated chippy, The Fisherman’s Kitchen, is just 1.28km from the nearest seaside.

But the study makes no mention of Whitehead’s Fish & Chips, ranked number one by The Times and just a stone’s throw away from Hornsea Beach.

It also fails to give a nod to The Rocketeer in North Berwick, which could only be more coastal if it served chips from the sea, and The Haven in Lytham St Annes, which is about ten lengths of a haddock away from the sea.

Indeed, Fry Magazine’s best 50 fish and chip shops for 2023 had a majority of northern shops make up its list.

Check out the top 10 below:

  1. Ainsworth’s Fish & Chip Shop, Caernarfon, Gwynedd
  2. Angells Fisheries, Newark, Nottinghamshire
  3. Auckley Friery, Auckley, Doncaster
  4. Bredon Village Fish and Chip Shop, Bredon, Tewksbury, Gloucestershire
  5. Burnham Fish and Chips, Burnham, Berkshire
  6. Catch Netherlee, Glasgow
  7. Chips @ No.8 Prestwich, Manchester
  8. Churchill’s Fish & Chips, Eastbourne
  9. Codfella’s, Greenwich Avenue, Ipswich
  10. Croft Street Fisheries, Farsley, Leeds

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Jack Peat

Jack is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE). He has contributed articles to VICE, Huffington Post and Independent and is a published author. Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

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