Barm, bap, cob or roll? Britain’s bread roll lines

What do you call a bread roll? I put 20,038 answers from two dialect surveys on one map, drew the lines where one word gives way to another, and then checked whether the high street agrees.

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A French site, Le Baguette Index, once rang around 6,500 bakeries to find where pain au chocolat turns into chocolatine, and drew the line across France. Britain has the same argument with more sides. Ask for a roll in Nottingham and someone will tell you it is a cob. In Bolton it is a barm, in Newcastle a bun, in Belfast a bap, in Coventry a batch and in Hull a breadcake.

Two dialect projects have already asked thousands of people: Our Dialects (11,609 answers) and the University of Leeds’ Dialect and Heritage Project (8,463 answers, placed where each person grew up). Their answers are theirs, not mine, so I have only published counts for areas with at least ten answers and smoothed maps. But put together and smoothed, they draw Britain’s bread roll lines very clearly.

The lines

The leading word in each place, after smoothing. Paler colour means a narrower lead. Black lines: one word overtakes another. Red dashes: roll falls below half of all answers.

Roll is the national default, at 46% of all answers. Across southern England about three answers in four say roll, and nothing else comes close. Scotland is roll country too: 94% of Scottish answers, which fits the morning roll and the Glasgow roll shop.

But draw the line where roll drops below half, and it runs from Cardigan Bay, south of Birmingham and Coventry, to the Lincolnshire coast. North of it the map shatters. Cob holds a block around Nottingham, Derby and Leicester. Barm holds Greater Manchester, south Lancashire and Merseyside, with muffin in a pocket around Oldham and Rochdale. Breadcake leads around Sheffield and Hull, teacake in patches of Cumbria and around Burnley and Bradford, and bun runs up the north-east from the Humber to Northumberland. Bap takes north Wales, Stoke and Staffordshire, and Northern Ireland, where 88% of answers say bap. Batch leads in just one small spot, around Coventry.

Counted by people rather than land, roll looks much less secure. Only 40% of answers from England come from places where roll has a majority.

Going north through England, in 50 km bands. Roll gives way first to cob, then to barm and breadcake, then to bun.

Nine maps of one bread roll

The leading-word map hides the runners-up, so here is each word on its own. Bap turns out to be everywhere at a low level, which is why it rarely wins. Barm and cob are the opposite: tight, intense homes and very little outside them.

Share of answers giving each word, with the total number of answers. Darkest colour: 60% or more.

Do the sources agree?

The two surveys were run separately, with different pictures and options, so they make a fair check on each other. On where each word is strong, they agree remarkably well: county by county, the correlation between them is 0.99 for barm, 0.95 for bun and 0.95 for cob. They disagree more on levels. Dialect and Heritage finds more roll everywhere, probably because “bread roll” was its own option.

Each dot is a county with at least 30 answers in both surveys. On the dashed line the two surveys agree exactly.

In 2018 YouGov asked almost 25,000 adults in England the same question and published county figures in ten-point bands. Our Dialects lands inside YouGov’s band for 18 of the 32 statements and within ten points for 7 more; where it misses, it always finds more of the local word, which is what you would expect from people keen enough on dialect to do a dialect quiz. The cob majorities hold up: cob is the answer of 59% in Leicestershire and 70% in Nottinghamshire. YouGov’s mysterious “something else” in South Yorkshire turns out to be breadcake.

Wikipedia mostly passes too. 84% of all barm answers come from Merseyside, Greater Manchester and Lancashire, just as its article says. One claim fails: the article on the bun says it is the savoury roll of Northern Ireland. There, bun is 2.1% of answers. It is a bap.

In Northern Ireland, bun is 2.1% of answers. It is a bap.

Is the cob fading?

The Leeds team suggested that younger people do not seem to use cob or batch. Their answers carry an age band, so I tested it. In Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, 42% of under 25s say cob, against 61% of those aged 45 to 64. That is a real slope, but a gentle one. For batch there are too few young answers to tell, and barm and bun show no sign of fading at all.

Dialect and Heritage answers in each word’s heartland, by age, with 95% intervals.

Does the high street agree?

This is where I started: if French bakeries reveal the chocolatine line, perhaps British shop names reveal the roll lines. I searched the names of all 614,437 food businesses rated by the Food Standards Agency, plus named bakeries and cafes in OpenStreetMap, and threw out the false friends by hand: Wok n Roll, sushi hand rolls, BAPS temples, Korean bap, corn on the cob, small batch coffee and a great many pieces of cake.

The honest answer is that the high street barely speaks dialect. Only 7.5 businesses in every 10,000 use a roll word at all. Barm, the fourth most common word in the surveys, is in 3 FSA business names. Bap is mostly a pun, used from Devon to Inverness.

Two words buck that. 38 of the 68 cob names are in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, home to just 4.7% of food businesses: the cob shop is a real Midlands institution. And 45% of the 206 butty names are in the North West, which has 11% of food businesses. A Foodhub poll found 58% of people call chips in bread a chip butty, but Greater London has 2 butty names.

Food business names containing a roll word (left) and a sandwich word (right), one per name and county, after removing false matches.

How I did this

I read both surveys’ answers from their published web maps, counted “bread roll” and “roll” as one word, and placed every answer in a county. I smoothed the answers with a Gaussian kernel 8 km wide (the width that best predicted each answer from its neighbours), widened up to 32 km where answers were sparse, and left blank any place with fewer than ten weighted answers nearby. The lines are where the two leading words are level, and where roll is exactly half. Halving or doubling the kernel leaves the leading word unchanged at 94% and 91% of answer locations.

The caveats matter. Both surveys are volunteer quizzes, not samples, and they have few answers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. One answer per person flattens people who use two words. Business names are jokes before they are dialect. All the counts, exclusion rules and code are public.