In our series of butcher profiles, food and farming writer, Marianne Landzettel, meets butchers from across the UK who have built their business around high-welfare, sustainably produced meat. Here, we travel to Bromley to meet Richard Douglas, a member of National Craft Butchers, and owner of ‘Carnivore’ and ‘Herbivore’, who shares his path from paper delivery boy to renowned craft butcher.
He can’t recall the date or even what time of year it was. He only remembers walking down a seemingly endless hospital corridor, together with his wife and a team of five doctors. Once they reached his office, the consultant finally gave them the news – “your son has a brain tumour”.
“Your world is gone in an instant,” says Richard Douglas. Wearing a dark blue apron, his glasses pushed up on his forehead, he stands behind the counter of his butcher shop in Bromley and tells us about his now 16-year-old son Jake. And how, if it hadn’t been for Jake, he probably would never have opened his own shops – not the one in Sidcup, which will be 10 years old in September, nor this one in Bromley, which he took on five years ago.