Jacob Ward is a baker at e5 Bakehouse in Hackney, east London. Established in 2010, e5 Bakehouse was London’s first independent bakery to champion artisanal sourdough baking and heritage grain. e5 recently opened the third of their independently run and owned cafe-bakeries at the V&A East Storehouse in Hackney Wick. Jacob started baking at home during lockdown and has been working as a baker for over three years. He spoke to The i Paper about balancing his work with a good night’s sleep.

“I’ve always really enjoyed making food, but the long hours and intense stress of kitchen hours was something I wanted to avoid.

“Baking is a really lovely combination of making something with your hands – being very detail-oriented with recipes – and being very tactile and somatic. Bread, in particular, is something that you have to nurture and care for, so there’s a holistic element as well. I’m very interested in that intercept of land and people, and how food acts as a glue that connects people to a place. I wanted to work somewhere that had an appreciation of this and E5 is very keen on this, so I felt very lucky when they started advertising for jobs.

Jacob enjoys the sense of community that comes with working in a bakery (Photo: Benjamin McMahon)

“When it comes to working hours, each bakery is different. Many start work at 4 or 5am and finish relatively early in the day. At e5 Bakehouse, we start work at 9am most days then take turns so one of us starts at 3am once a week to come in early to do the bake. So, it’s very gentle until that one brutal day.

“On my early-shift day, it can be hard to get to sleep early. I try to be in bed by 10pm, which gives me about four hours of sleep. It’s not really enough, but it’s tolerable for one day a week to feel human. If I try to sleep earlier, there’s a lot of noise as well – my neighbours upstairs are busy living their lives. They’re the people that you hate most when you’re lying there and trying to get to sleep. I actually get on really well with them, so I have to remind myself that it’s not personal and that no one owes me silence.

“Noise does affect me, so that can be difficult, but my housemates are very accommodating and keep it down when I’m on an early shift. I try to avoid looking at my phone, but that doesn’t always happen, in reality. Some of my colleagues just don’t go to bed and come in for their shift a bit earlier and start baking at 2am. I don’t think that’s very sustainable for me, though!

Jacob describes feeding people as “a loving, caring act” (Photo: Benjamin McMahon)

“Thankfully, I live a 10-minute bike-ride away, which means I don’t need to rely on public transport or drive in, which is how I make it work. If I lived further afield, I’d be really struggling with those early starts.

“The day after the bake, I like to come home and have a bath. I’ll be covered in burnt flour and really sweaty, so relaxing in the tub is a nice way to recover.

“I’ll also sometimes take a nap after that – about 40 minutes or an hour works for me, or I start to feel groggy. I have to see how I feel though. I once went to the cinema for an afternoon showing after an early shift and it ended with me being woken up by an usher. I have no idea how that film ended.

“The early shift and limited sleep has a big impact on my social life and romantic life and the people I live with. Many people doing this kind of work are in relatively precarious housing situations, such as house shares, with a high turnover of housemates. I’m very lucky to live with people who are really respectful. It helps that I bring them cake and bread all the time. A little bribery goes a long way!

“Having disrupted sleep is really bad for your brain and your body. And working nights or unusual shift patterns has repercussions for your whole life, despite only being paid for the time you’re working. It stops you functioning normally – you can’t really go out for dinner at a restaurant or to the cinema to see something that finishes at 11pm, when you need to be winding down for bed two hours before that.

A member of the e5 bakehouse team preparing the bakes (Photo: Benjamin McMahon)

“You also have to be at peace with not making much money. We’re a Living Wage employer, but some of my friends are making double or triple what I take home. It’s also a very physical role; you’re standing up for at least eight hours a day and lifting heavy stuff up, lugging big sacks of flour and bending over to pick things up all day.

“For me, the benefits are worth it, though. Feeding people is a really caring, loving act, and getting to do that every day is a real privilege. And bakers are very warm, kind people – it’s a real community. I’ve got colleagues who are making artisan chocolate and roasting coffee who have all these amazing interests and passions who want to explore that and share it with you, which is so, so lovely. So, there’s plenty of joy involved but it does come at a cost.”

As told to Joanna Whitehead