Percy Ingle

Great bread, cakes, and the staff are really friendly and helpful. Will miss it as I am leaving the area. One young lady actually sold me her bread (when there were none left at the end of the day). You don’t get service like this elsewhere.

Haven’t seen a Percy Ingles in ages! Nothing appears to have changed though. Rolls, bread, cakes bla bla bla…

Having grown up in Hackney I am very familiar with Percy Ingle bakery. I now live in West London and have realised that Percy is stritcly an East London company.
The lack of green and orange Percy shop front is replaced by the more well known Greg’s bakery. As much as I love Greg’s sausage rolls and chocolate chip cookies, Percy wil always be a nostalgic place full of childhood, teenage and hungover days when only a jam donut or sausage roll would do.
The Mare Street branch is one of a few branches where you can sit in and enjoy the full Percy Ingle experience. The plastic orange or green chairs are ALWAYS occupied by a few old people who have probably been drinking the same cup of tea for a few hours.
Percy Ingle is a dated but then so are the prices and that can’t be a bad thing.

This is a small store selling cakes, bread, rolls and pastries. Can get rather busy on a saturday (market day). Staff plesant but slow, but food lovely and reasonably priced

If Greggs bakery had a weird spinster aunt, it would be Percy Ingles, the East London bakery only found in Hackney, Leighton, Walthamstow and nowhere else. It reminds me of the bakery in the small village i grew up in. That went bust some years ago, and Percy is threatening to go the same way which seems such a travesty as we should be supporting small local business’s, not watching them shut down. So, on that note, what’s it like? Well, lets start of by saying it’s cheap. I mean really cheap. Take away coffee and tea is 70p, (you know sometimes when you’re hungover you just want a cup of builders tea, not a skinny mocha-​latte with lo cal sugar, well this is for you). It’s honest grub served in the most outdated and depressing setting you can imagine. But when you’re choosing to buy grease laden pastry and baked goods, then you can’t expect the Ivy can you?!
Please, lets support our local businesses and keep Percy alive; there’s something comforting juxtaposed with the depressing ambience. Go pick up a Cornish pasty and a bakewell tart, and pretend you’re 11 again eating it with your mates in the park. Ahhhh.

What defines Hackney? The more cynical might nominate the many and various evangelical churches dotted in back alleys and under bridges around the borough. Other souls, most likely those who haven’t actually been here before, may think of Hackney in terms of that Worst Places to Live in Britain show on Channel 4 a few years back. Still others might answer that its the curious mix of white arty types and ethnic newcomers that give the area its character.
For me, the chain of Percy Ingle bakeries is just about as ‘Ackney as it gets. The list of their locations reads like a where’s where of crumbling cockney grime: Narrow Way; Wells Street; Ridley Road; Leytonstone; Hoxton Market, Hackney Wick.
Its sort of like Hackney’s answer to Gregg’s, the eponymously revolting bakery chain. You can either get cheap bread or a cheap sandwich and some tea or coffee. The bread itself isn’t bad and there’s a massive choice. I usually get my fix for Irish Soda bread in here — ask for a quarter or the lovely Baltic ladies in the lurid green uniform who serve you will no doubt try to sell you the whole ‘wheel’.
The café food itself is very ordinary, and I say that not necessarily in a bad way. It’s just a case of ‘does what it says on the tin’ food: crispy salad rolls with either cheese, ham or tuna; cornish pasties; fruit scones; tea (70p). You get the picture. Good honest grub from a supremely dated café chain that you will only ever see in Hackney — and possibly not for much longer either.