London comes out on top in Good Food Guide list of Britain's 50 best bakeries

The Good Food Guide has named 2026 “the year of the destination bakery” and has announced its new list of the 50 best in Britain.

London comes out on top in the list, with 10 entries including Toad in Camberwell and Chatsworth Bakehouse in Crystal Palace .

The others in the capital named in the top 50 are Arôme in Covent Garden, August in Battersea, Don’t Tell Dad in Queen’s Park, E5 Bakehouse in Hackney, Eric’s in East Dulwich, Fred in Oxford Circus, and Lucky Yu and Suba, both in Walthamstow.

The guide said its line-up reflects “the extraordinary range and vitality of Britain’s modern baking scene” and said it celebrates “the nation’s boundary-pushing artisans who are experimenting with regionally grown, locally milled heritage grains”.

Each bakery was “scrupulously stress tested” by editors of the guide, an announcement said, while the full list is expansive and diverse, charting everything from Japanese-French precision at Arôme to West African influence at Suba.

Also heralded are micro bakeries , such as Lucky Yu, a Cantonese venture founded by the talented Hai Lin and which sells pastries such as red bean paste buns and black sesame and lemon curd pastries.

Guide editors also praised the accessibility of bakeries at a time when dining out in restaurants is more expensive than ever.

Though the bakeries named in the list are generally upmarket, propelling the “new normal of a £5 Danish”, they remain a more affordable way to eat out.

Good Food Guide editor Chloë Hamilton said: “Choosing just 50 winners was an almost impossible task given how diverse and highly skilled the British baking scene has become.

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“From wood-fired sourdough in Perthshire to a central London café peddling pains au chocolat that take you straight to the streets of Paris, one thing uniting them all is sheer unadulterated deliciousness.”
The list was put together in partnership with the tech platform Square, whose head of marketing Lizzie Barclay said: “Britain's bakery scene is a brilliant example of the independent spirit that makes local businesses so vital to their communities.

“From micro bakeries operating out of a single oven to multi-award-winning artisans pushing the boundaries of craft and flavour, these 50 bakeries represent exactly the kind of businesses Square is proud to support.”
Good Food Guide’s 50 Best Bakeries 2026