I have just stumbled in to one of the earlier pages in this thread, which was an offered link in a search for something else so I was quite surprised when the target turned out to be about pies!
And then I actually read a little more just out of curiosity, came across the fact of it being about Fleur de Lys pies in particular, and the floodgates opened to a whole river of rememberings!!
When I left school in the early 60s I decided not to do the traditional Gap Year break before Uni and go travelling, but instead to take a job with the sole aim of saving as much as I could for that year as I knew a lump of extra cash would then come in very handy!
So I took an office job with a firm on Colmore Row, which involved some clerical work and also some office-junior type admin things such as making sure stationery supplies etc were kept stocked-up, taking/fetching special documents etc to/from others we worked with/through around the City, learning and operating the in-house printer/copier (old-meaning!) that was used for smaller reports etc rather than go out to a Printer, taking care of the outbound post each afternoon, and other routine things that every former-office-junior here will also have done.
And amongst those was the lunch-run ... see where I am going?
There were a couple of dozen or-so people working there. Some left the building at lunchtime, some stayed but always bought a sandwich lunch with them each day. But the rest, about a dozen, was where the most important person with the most important job in the place came in to their own ... taking the orders and fetching the lunches!
A couple would want a particular sandwich fresh-made from Lewis's, one or two would have brought some fruit or salad but would want a croissant or some pastries with them, but the lunch connoisseurs required the Ambrosia that was ... a Fleur de Lys pie!
At that point I had never actually heard of meat pies in terms of specific brand names just their fillings, but for the first 2-3 times I was taken through the routine of going round all the Staff and writing a list and taking the money, and then seeing where to go for this and that and the other. "We'll leave the pies for last, they'll need to still be hot".
On the first day I happened to notice pies in places we went to first for something, and expected to be buying pies there too but how wrong could I be!
We also got two croissants and I think a couple of cream cakes that time from another place like a Wimbush and part of me wonders if that was somewhere near Lewis's but its barely a memory at all now ... and some kind of side-order for a drink (I remember it was in a bottle not a carton then .. guessing pop or a fruit drink but I really can't now remember, just that it was an extra thing to fetch.)
So that just left the pies, and I was shown to the place they HAD to be bought from.
It was a cafe/restaurant/patisserie/SOMEthing (I can't remember the greater detail now) that was very close to the top of New Street on the north side just before the curve that then looped you around past Lyons and steered you back up in to that end of Colmore Row pretty much, which handily was not far at all from the office!
The way we had already gone for this-and-that meant we were coming at it from lower down New St., and as we got closer I noticed a queue ahead for something. And then I saw that it was a queue waiting to be served at an open hatch in the window of where we were headed, through which it seemed that half the office population of the city centre were buying their lunches!
And when it was our turn, THAT was when I got the message! All it took was the delicious smell
The next day I didn't bother with a packed lunch, and instead had my first FdeL S&K pie. De-li-cious.
And for the rest of that week, and for the rest of the year-ish that I was there too, lunch Mon-Fri was always ... yup!
****
And just to add ...
Remembering that for the first time in too many decades has also drifted me in to so many memories of people and more that are connected with that time and place, like the caretakers' basement flat where I would go to collect a huge pot of tea mid-morning and mid-afternoon that they had been paid quite separately to provide, and where sometimes I would disappear for a naughty half-hour break of my own with them, a nice elderly couple.
So it is always worth checking where search-links take you, even the no-connection ones can turn out to have much waiting just for you!
TQ
