📍The Cricketers, Wicken Road, Clavering, Saffron Walden CB11 4QT, UK
1975 – 1991“Jamie Oliver was born in May 1975 and grew up in Clavering, a pretty village of thatched cottages and fields in north-west Essex, where his parents, Trevor and Sally, ran the Cricketers, a busy pub and restaurant. The family lived above and beside the pub, and the kitchen was the heart of his childhood. He has said he was helping out by the age of five, washing glasses and chopping vegetables for a pound an hour, and by eleven he could chop as fast as any of the chefs. He has a younger sister, Anna-Marie. School was much harder. He struggled to read and write, and at Newport Free Grammar School he was put in special needs classes and felt labelled as a thick kid; only decades later was he diagnosed with dyslexia. In the kitchen, though, he shone, learning from the chefs, his father and the rhythm of a busy pub. He played drums in a band called Scarlet Division with friends, and he grew up surrounded by the gardens, farms and markets of rural Essex, which gave him his love of fresh, seasonal food. He left school at sixteen with two GCSEs and studied catering at Westminster Kingsway College, then worked at Antonio Carluccio's Neal Street Restaurant and the River Café in London, where a television crew spotted him in 1997. The Naked Chef made him a star, and he went on to campaign for healthier school dinners and to sell millions of cookbooks. He has often credited the kitchen at the Cricketers with making him who he is.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today