The crisp-crusted, fresh-tomato-slicked vital intelligence came to me the way the very best gossip always does in Soho: while I was having my hair cut. Those boys know what’s going on: the openings, the closures, who’s doing what to whom and when. A new pizza place called Breadstall had just opened down the street, Erminio said, while attending to a client in the next chair. And it’s good. Filipe, who looks after me (and Giorgio Locatelli, as it happens) agreed. You should never ignore a tip from your hairdresser, especially one about good pizza. I went to take a look.

The pizza business is idiosyncratic. Restaurants generally depend on menus of varying complexity and price point. Pizza, meanwhile, is excruciatingly simple. It’s bread with stuff on top. It’s also economically precarious in that the product is mostly high margin, but low price. Success therefore depends upon volume. Luckily, it always has a market. While high-street pizza parlours have been a thing in the UK since 1965 when the late Peter Boizot launched PizzaExpress, the modern story arguably begins in 2008 with the opening, within one of Brixton’s old covered markets, of Franco Manca.

It was a white-tiled space, with rough wood seating, which served equally rugged, bubbled and blistered Neapolitan-style sourdough pizzas, hand-shaped and individual as opposed to the bigger, thinner New York style, which is generally sold by the slice. Franco Manca rolled out, with somewhat slapdash quality control, and the Neapolitan style quickly came to dominate the British market. It was joined in 2012 by Pizza Pilgrims, with its kitsch, pea-green Italian interiors and then in 2014 by Rudy’s, which began as a single shop in Manchester’s Ancoats. The original Rudy’s look was built from necessity: visible stacks of tinned San Marzano tomatoes and flour sacks because there was nowhere else to store them. The workshop look has been replicated across a group which is now almost three dozen strong, and growing. There are always new arrivals: the New York-style Nell’s in Manchester, for example, or Crisp within a west London pub, or Vincenzo’s in Bushey, Hertfordshire, each in turn building a devoted following.