A hot cross bun tradition at the Widow's Son pub

The Widow's Son pub in Bromley-by-Bow, East London, has its own version of celebrating the hot cross bun on Good Friday. Every year, on this date, a sailor from the Royal Navy puts a bun in the net hanging above the bar to continue an old tradition.

Hot cross buns are spiced sweet buns usually made with fruit, marked with a cross on the top, and traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the United Kingdom, and adopted by some of its former colonial territories. The bun marks the end of Lent, and different parts of it have a certain meaning, including the cross representing the crucifixion of Jesus, and the spices inside signifying those used to embalm him at his burial.

In many historically Christian countries, dairy products were forbidden in Lent until Palm Sunday and the buns were a popular food for this period beginning with the evening of Shrove Tuesday to midday Good Friday. One theory is that the Hot Cross Bun originated from St Albans, where Brother Thomas Rodcliffe, a 14th-century monk at the abbey there, developed a recipe called an 'Alban Bun' and distributed them to the local poor on Good Friday.

The first definite record of hot cross buns comes from a London street cry: "Good Friday comes this month, the old woman runs. With one or two a penny hot cross buns", which appeared in Poor Robin's Almanac for 1733.

Legend has it that an old widow lived in a cottage on the site of what is now the Widow's Son pub. Her only son had gone to sea, but wrote to his mother saying that he would be returning home at Easter and looking forward to a nice hot cross bun. Though he never returned, his mother continued to cook a fresh hot cross bun every Good Friday for the rest of her life, and on her death, a huge collection of hot cross buns was discovered in a net hanging from the ceiling of the cottage, one bun for every year he had been gone.

In 1848, a pub was built on the spot, and the tradition continued - baking and storing a bun in a hammock hung from the ceiling on Good Friday, heavily glazed to prevent them from rotting.

When the pub closed in 2015, the collection of buns, some as old as 80 years, were lost. Since its re-opening in 2017, the tradition has, however, been re-established and each year, sailors come to the pub to put a bun inside the hammock hanging from the ceiling.

Members of the public are invited to come along for free hot cross buns, and to watch the sailors carry out the tradition.