During the pandemic, Rebecca Spaven and Oliver Costello were set up by a mutual friend. They were told they’d hit it off on the basis that they were both bakers who loved a band called Prefab Sprout. At the time, Costello was a pastry chef at Ottolenghi, Spaven made bread at Bloomsbury’s Fortitude Bakehouse. On a socially distanced walk in Dulwich Park, they discovered not only a shared desire to open their own bakery but “the same crazy idea” to open one in a derelict stable block in Camberwell’s Ruskin Park.
The next day, they bumped into one another snooping around the stables. “We were both, like, ‘Oh, it’s you,’” laughs Spaven, “It was very clear that we had a similar idea of what we wanted to open – somewhere accessible and community-minded.” What might have been the start of intense business rivalry turned out to be recognition of a stellar synergy.
Opening a bakery in the old stable was not to be (it needed tenants to make a big investment in renovations), “but we’d had the dream individually,” says Costello, “and quickly realised we needed someone to do it with.” In April 2022, they opened a bakery in Camberwell called Frog, which metamorphosed into Toad six months later. The hole in the wall on a relatively quiet strip of Peckham Road quickly became renowned for its breathtaking bread, peerless pastries and a quietly confident point of view. People would, and still do, travel from far and wide to bag an everything bagel croissant or a seasonal sun bun.
Today, July 8, the pair opened Toad’s second site. It’s in Deptford Market, gracing another south-east London high street with a local bakery beyond its wildest dreams. There, locals will find everything that London has come to expect from Toad – that bread, soy sauce chocolate chip cookies, coffee from Catalyst roastery and, at check out, a tight edit of extras, from merch to Gaza Cola and “Toad in the Hole” condoms. But it’s in a space which is, in many ways, the antithesis of the Camberwell branch: a light-filled production kitchen that invites customers “to see the systems and work that goes into baking”, says Costello. “It’s not just a big factory.” All bread production has moved to Deptford; loaves will be taken to the Camberwell bakery each morning.
For the Deptford outpost, the pair commissioned designer-carpenter Nick Tudor to create a space in which “everything floats”. A long chestnut wood counter guides customers along a production line of pastry prep, beyond which they can see the inner workings of the bakery, to racks of finished articles and a coffee station, where for the first time, Toad will sell espresso as well as filter coffee. It will be opening a bit earlier too, 7.30am, to catch the dough-craving commuters en route to work.
The Deptford bakery is in St Paul’s House, which was originally built as a rectory for the church a few yards up the road, and since has variously been a squat, a guardianship and a job centre. Spaven and Costello have created 25 new jobs for the Deptford site and are determined to recruit locally. They’ve also held firm in their pricing – despite food cost increases, you can buy a bread roll for 80p, an iced brioche for £2.50 and a filter coffee for less than £3. “We can never compete with the supermarkets or with Gregg’s,” says Costello, “but this does still feel like an opportunity to return a bakery to a high street that doesn’t rely on industrialised systems and low wages.” A loaf of Toad bread might elevate your morning toast, “but it shouldn’t be a luxury – we have a much lower barrier to entry than a pub pulling £7 pints”, Spaven says.
“I’m a bit contrary when it comes to bread,” Spaven says. “I refuse to do a white sourdough and I don’t like pizza. I make hardcore wholemeal, northern European-style stuff. I’m half-Norwegian and I love rye, wholemeal … dark breads.” She says people might want a round white sourdough but they can go anywhere for that. “I don’t want to give people what they want! I want to give people what I want. What they don’t know they want,” she laughs. “That’s my approach.” All that said, she does make sourdough baguettes and tin loaves, which are staples.
Meanwhile, as well as being “ultra-seasonal” – at the time of writing in high summer, Toad danishes flaunt all the red berries of the moment on a fat bed of lurid custard – Costello’s background in graphic design has hard-wired him to produce “things that look nice”. He is responsible for the Toad logo, too, a bird’s eye view of a portly, almost dough-like batrachian.
Both Costello and Spaven sport a Toad-themed tattoo – he the logo, she a lithe Toad reaching for a baguette. Why the name, though? When the search for a good name began, “we were clear that [we] didn’t want anything cutesy,” Spaven says. They had learnt of a haiku about a frog whose shadow reaches a rock before them – “the idea is that, wherever you want to go, you’re already there. I guess it’s about self-determination and trying your best and all that stuff,” Costello says with a shrug. The bakery launched as Frog before chef Adam Handling, whose flagship restaurant in Covent Garden is also called Frog, threatened legal action.
They pivoted to Toad, which both insist is a better name – after all, toads are arguably less cutesy than frogs. “The outpouring of support we had as a result was amazing,” Spaven says, and the headlines raised awareness of Toad beyond their Camberwell environs.
It has always seemed fitting that the original Toad site calls Camberwell College of Arts and the local registry office its neighbours – a place of creative flair that inspires commitment. Now, in Deptford in a former rectory, it feels only one step removed from a place of worship – and one that’s open every day, no less.
Toad Bakery Deptford
Restaurant 1, St Paul's House, 3 Market Yard, SE8 4BX
Hours:
Mon to Fri 7.30am–3.30pm
Sat 8am–4pm
Sun 9am–3pm
