By food4c_Admin
Sadly Marine Ices in its newer incanation folded in August, the same week that another London icon I Camisa shuttered up the doors in Soho. It rounds off a long history. The original parlour – pictured – was a few doors up the road towards the station and is now a fancy block of flats above a Tesco. It was sold in 2014. Gaetano Mansi – see his picture and moustache below – came from Salerno as a child and first traded in Drummond Street off Euston Road, using ice cream to use up overly ripe fruit. He opened a second outlet Manzi’s Café on Haverstock Hill in 1931 which has some claim and much respect as London’s oldest and then surely finest purveyor of ice cream, although Italian ice cream vendors were a feature on the streets, mostly emanating from Clerkenwell, even befolre the turn of that century. It was Mansi’s son Aldo who rebuilt the parlour after World War 2 and renamed it Marine because the building had a bridge and a porthole. It still trades on its name – slightly adjusted to Marine Gelato – a few blocks closer to the market under new, still Italian management, but memories are enshrined in the banana split and the knickerbocker glory alongside 24 regular flavours, made in a state of the art facility in Leeds. No more.
