How the curry has conquered Britain

It's becoming more British than roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, more popular than fish and chips. A meal out in Britain is more likely to include chicken tikka masala, than meat and two veg. Indian restaurants, offering a style and cuisine made great in Britain and unknown on the sub-continent, are booming.

With a turnover of more than GBP2.6 billion (HK$33.1 billion) the South Asian restaurant business is now bigger than the steel, coal and shipbuilding industries added together. And with a British university offering students courses in curry studies, it is set to grow still further.

Proof of its place in the heart of popular British culture came this summer when a song named after a popular Indian dish 'Vindaloo' was adopted as the unofficial anthem of the England football team in the World Cup and reached number one in the pop charts.

For years the local curry house struggled with an unappetising image based on taped sitar music and flock wallpaper. Each evening staff faced a stomach churning influx of drunken lager louts who wanted loads more lager and out did one another to eat the house's hottest curry.

In 1970, there were only about 1,500 Indian restaurants which served mostly other migrant workers who had not developed a taste for British food. But a wave of migrants from Bangladesh caused a massive expansion so there are now 15,000 restaurants or take-aways across the country.

Asif Hashmi, editor of the Tandoori Magazine, which caters to the industry, believes the popularity has little to do with traditional Indian cooking and more to do with clever marketing by migrants who had few other outlets for their business skills.

'Basically when the migrants arrived in the 1970s they had some fairly sharp business skills but they were unable to find jobs. They weren't great cooks but they just picked up pots and pans and started the only business they could,' Mr Hashmi said.