Cultural Research

When you hear the gentle jingle of the ice cream van coming down your street and you start to salivate, do you ever wonder how this unique form of selling evolved? Over 5,000 ice cream van operators, ‘mobilers’ as they are known in the trade, operate in the UK today. A new van will often cost £20,000 - £30,000 and between them they sell over £100 million worth of ice cream a year.

Ice cream has always been a commodity which has lent itself to be sold at point of consumption simply because it cannot be carried along with you - you have to eat it shortly after you buy it. Ice cream became widely available in the UK at the end of the nineteenth century and it was sold from push carts and horse drawn wagons. As motorised vehicles became available they too were used for ice cream sales, but not in any major way until after the Second World War.