E5 Bakehouse

Ben Mackinnon left a career in sustainability consulting in the spring of 2010, took a short course at the School of Artisan Food, and came home to Hackney to build a clay oven in the corner of a railway arch, firing it with scrap wood from local carpenters. For the first six months he hand delivered loaves to around twenty homes a week, with early customers including Palm2 and Leila's in Shoreditch, and E5 is now widely credited as one of the shops that kicked off London's modern sourdough movement. Bread came first, then lunches, then coffee and cakes, in that order, as the arch grew into a proper bakery.

Coffee followed the same principles the bakery had already set for flour, roasted in house since 2017 with an emphasis on community owned, origin based exporters and organic certification on about half of what E5 buys. The business has since added a second bakery and roastery in Poplar, a third outpost inside the V&A East Storehouse, its own Suffolk wheat farm and flour mill, a wholesale operation that supplies loaves to cafes and shops well beyond Hackney, and even a stretch of coffee shipped from Colombia by sail cargo rather than container ship.

In 2021 Mackinnon fought a steep rent increase from the arch's new landlord, framing it publicly as part of a wider fight by small businesses operating out of Network Rail's railway arches, and the original London Fields arch has kept baking and pulling espresso through all of it.