The era The Hardacres is set in explains why fried herring could make you a fortune
The Hardacres — Channel 5's rags-to-riches saga, first broadcast on 7 October 2024 and back for a second series from 14 May 2026 — asks you to swallow quite a premise: a destitute Yorkshire family gets rich, spectacularly rich, off a fried fish stall. £250,000 in 1890s money, in the show's telling, topped up by South African shares.
Absurdly fast? On screen, yes. But the family business itself is the most historically plausible thing in the programme — because of exactly when it's set.
The 1890s were the golden age of fried fish
The series, based on C. L. Skelton's 1976 novel saga, takes place in 1890s coastal Yorkshire — and that decade sat in the middle of a genuine fried-fish boom. Fried fish had been sold in British cities since at least the 1830s (Dickens mentions a fried fish warehouse in Oliver Twist), and the first recognised fish and chip shops opened in the 1860s. By 1910, Britain had an estimated 25,000 of them.
Three things made the timing perfect:
- Steam trawlers — industrial fishing fleets hauled in fish, herring included, in previously unimaginable quantities, crashing the price.
- Railways — fresh catch could reach inland towns within hours, for the first time in history.
- Hungry industrial workers — millions of factory and dock labourers wanted hot, cheap, filling food. Fried fish was the original fast food.
A stall selling fried herring straight off the Yorkshire docks in the 1890s wasn't a fantasy. It was a growth industry.
Why herring specifically?
Because it was everywhere. Herring — the "silver darlings" — was the backbone of the east-coast fishing economy, landed in vast quantities and cheap enough for the poorest customers. It's also the trade the Hardacres already know: before the accident that costs patriarch Sam (Liam McMahon) his dock job, the family gut fish for a living. Mary's stall simply moves them one step up the chain — from processing the fish to selling it fried.
"Mary's an entrepreneur and is desperate for this other world," Claire Cooper, who plays her, told What to Watch in 2024.
Where the show speeds things up
The compression is real: reviewers noted the family rockets from penury to a country estate within a single episode, with a friendly banker and a lucky stock market punt doing half the work. Real Victorian fried-fish sellers built modest livelihoods over decades, not fortunes over months.
But the underlying idea — that the 1890s let a working family with no capital ride a food revolution upwards — is solid history. The Hardacres just took the express train.