London

Well-tailored double act Gilbert and George have lived in Fournier Street, a turnip’s throw from Old Spitalfields Market, since 1968. In that time they’ve seen many changes, taken many pictures, and eaten in many cafés. Creatures of habit who rarely leave the East End and prefer to keep their brains uncluttered by quotidian decisions such as shopping or cooking, they take their lunch at 11am each day, frequenting only a handful of places at any one time. Never do they cook at home – they don’t even have a kitchen. Feature continues

George: ‘The reason we keep going back to the same places is simple. We don’t have to think. We keep our brains for other things. We never cook. We’ve never even boiled an egg. We calculated that we’d probably have spent seven years washing up if you added it all up, instead of thinking and feeling.’

Gilbert: ‘You don’t have to chuck the cabbage away. There are no smells. No shopping. It’s probably cheaper in the end. You end up having to chuck a lot of stuff away. And we can choose what we want.’

George: ‘When you see people staggering from the supermarket to their car with their shopping, it looks exhausting. We go shopping once every two years and buy 3,000 lavatory rolls. It’s only toothpaste, soap, lavatory paper. For coffee we buy 20 catering tins from the cash and carry. It’s past its sell-by date by the time we use it.’

Gilbert: ‘It’s only milk we buy every day.’

George: ‘Even our suits, we try to keep roughly the same style so that we don’t have to think about them. You have the whole day in front of you to think about what you want. We just don’t want to waste our brains. We’d rather save them for something we want to do. Especially not cooking, which is much better done by somebody else.’

Though occasionally they’ll make the journey to the West End if they are entertaining guests, mainly they prefer their local caffs, many of which have become extensions of their house and their owners lifelong friends. We asked them to share their memories of three-and-a-half decades of dining out and raided their photo archive for some personal and never-before-seen snaps.