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Would you eat a smoky spider flavour Monster Munch? What about a Bovril crisp, cooked up to celebrate the release of Back to the Future? Then there’s hedgehog flavour – and even a Wallace and Gromit corn snack designed to capture the unique taste of moon cheese, which the duo rocketed off to collect in A Grand Day Out.
All these salty, crunchy and perhaps even tasty snacks are celebrated in UK Crisp Packets 1970-2000, a 140-page compendium that delves into the colourful, often strange and occasionally wild world of crisp packet design. The book will come as a heavy hit of nostalgia for many people, featuring various childhood favourites – Chipsticks, Frazzles, Snaps – along with the lesser known and the rare.
You’ll find Dennis the Menace bacon and baked bean flavour alongside Golden Wonder roast turkey and stuffing and Sonic the Hedgehog salt and vinegar. There are long-gone regional brands from Penryn, Blackpool and Wigan, along with a whole heap of TV and film special editions, including the Spice Girls, Thunderbirds, Zig and Zag, Dr Who, The Mask and Jurassic Park.
The book is by a 43-year-old artist going by the name of Chris Packet, who has amassed quite an archive. It is nothing if not eclectic, the designs it showcases ranging from straightforward to inspired to bizarre. There’s union jack-clad cheese and onion to commemorate the 1981 royal wedding and even innuendo-laden comic strips that recall smutty seaside postcards. The Dandy’s Beryl the Peril fronts a bag of sausage and tomato.
Equally fascinating, though, is the sheer range of lettering, illustrations, cartoons and styles that always feel playful and are sometimes even cool. An early packet of Discos – all wavy lines, 3D lettering and sharp design – is as alluring as a record sleeve. Odduns, a cheeseburger flavour potato snack, is graced with a complex triangular shape that is geometrically impossible. There’s a definite air of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon cover.
The story of this collection began in 2018, when Packet was exploring a disused train tunnel in London. “I’d heard stories about raves happening in it back in the 90s,” he recalls. “There was still rave logo graffiti on the walls.”
Then something else caught his eye. On the ground, he saw a tatty item. Underneath the dirt, he could make out sharp blues and vivid greens, as well as an Alien-like figure firing a laser gun. It was a decades-old pickled onion Space Raiders packet, marked 10p. “Usually litter doesn’t last that long,” Packet says. “But it had settled in the tunnel and was protected from rain, sunlight, litter-pickers and everything else.”
He found another, then another, and soon his haul had grown to include a classic Smiths Salt’n’Shake bag, tomato flavour Quavers from 1996, and a bag of Monster Munch bearing a best before date of July 1989. “They brought back strong memories from my childhood,” recalls Packet. “I was also like, ‘Wow, I forgot how good these graphics are.’ I realised they were actually unique pieces of history.”
Packet, who is now based in Athens, began scouring the internet for more, buying bags from collectors. Friends would also keep an eye out, with one pal finding a packet in a second world war bunker in Dover that had been there since the 1980s.
“My criteria is the artwork,” he says. “I’m from a graffiti and art background, so I’m interested in design. It’s about the lettering, the illustration, the cartoon characters.” He cites Space Raiders. “Compare the modern Space Raiders packet to the original by Brett Ewins.” Ewins was a comic book artist revered for his work on 2000AD strips like Judge Dredd. “It’s like they’ve forgotten about the art of design,” says Packet.
His book is intended to memorialise a golden era. “After 2000,” he says, “packets just lost something. Anything that looks like a 3D, computer-aided design model doesn’t appeal at all. Some of the designs were hand-drawn but when computers started coming in, I think a lot of these guys lost their trade. You obviously lose a lot of character and detail with that.”
The book has a foreword by Annebella Pollen, professor of visual and material culture at the University of Brighton. “It’s cultural detritus,” she says. “But this very humble material – that’s really no more than litter – can tell an alternative history.” The professor’s introduction tackles everything from gender representation to the loss of regional independent companies, while looking at the fact that, as part of the fight against childhood obesity, crisps are now banned in schools. “This is children’s culture,” she says of the old packets. “There was a clear strategic attempt to move crisps beyond being bar snacks associated with adult men in pubs and into kids’ lunch boxes.”
Crisp nostalgia, Pollen believes, hits people deeply for very nuanced reasons. “It’s reminding them of those moments as kids when they have a bit of autonomy,” she says. “Maybe it’s over what goes in their lunch box or their first 10p to spend in a tuck shop – those early choices that were your own. These may just be empty packets now, but we are filling them with memories.”
● UK Crisp Packets 1970-2000 is published by Sports Banger; @chris_packet
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