The incredible renaissance behind London's thriving pizza scene

London has never really had a cuisine to call its own. The city borrows, adapts, absorbs, and somewhere in that process, usually without anyone announcing it, something new gets made. That is more or less what has happened with pizza.

Over the past few years, a style has emerged here that critics and obsessives are now willing to put up against anything coming out of Naples or New York. Gerry del Guercio and Paul Delany, who run the food review series Bite Twice on Instagram and TikTok, have eaten their way through some 600 London pizzas and come back from trips to the American East Coast preferring what they had at home. The claim would have sounded absurd not long ago. It no longer does.

London pizza steals the quality of ingredients from Neapolitan tradition, the size and visual confidence of New York, the dark char of New Haven, and plays around with dough in ways that owe something to Roman-style baking, without feeling bound to any of them. Food journalist Clare Finney, who first wrote about the category in 2019, has described it as an expression of the city itself: plural, hard to pin down, shaped by the many communities that pass through it.

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A city that allows permeation

Food moves through London the way most things do: laterally, informally, across neighbourhoods and largely by accident. The pizza scene here didn't emerge from culinary schools or restaurant groups with a unified vision. It came out of lockdown. Sebastian Vince started Breadstall as a takeaway baking business in Clapham; when restrictions lifted he began selling slices and discovered he was onto something. His pizzas use a biga, a mix of pre-fermented and fresh dough, that gives the crust an unlikely combination of crunch and chew. Jay Rayner called it almost the best pizza he had ever eaten. Breadstall's Soho location, which opened in 2024, now moves around 10,000 slices a week at peak.

Carl McCluskey started Crisp out of his grandmother's pub in Hammersmith, and the pub connection turns out to matter more broadly. Across the city, pizza operators began moving into pubs that had been struggling with food for years, and the fit proved better than anyone expected. Pints and pizza is a combination London took to instinctively, and one that gave a new generation of pizzerias a ready-made home.

No dogma

Part of what makes this moment interesting is what's happening at both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Napoli on the Road in Chiswick was named Europe's best pizzeria in both 2024 and 2025, and ranked fifth in the world. A few miles away, Short Road Pizza — a pop-up running out of pubs in Bethnal Green and Leyton — won the 2025 National Pizza Awards with a Roman-style thin crust topped with chimichurri, burrata and anchovies. Both are London. Neither is particularly interested in what the other is doing.

Chefs here arrived without a received tradition to protect, which means they also arrived without its constraints. The result is a scene that resists easy categorisation, not because it lacks identity, but because its identity is restlessness.