The best festive sandwiches in London for Christmas 2017

If you, like me, have been inundated this festive period with the supermarkets’ mediocre and, quite frankly, insipid attempts at the Christmas sandwich then I implore you to keep reading. Like I say to the very few ladies I’ve miraculously managed to woo back to my bedroom, ‘I’ll try not to disappoint’.

When it comes to festive sandwiches, I feel like every Christmas plays the same broken, monotonous record. Very few give me the excitement of the Coca Cola advert, for example, or the pure elation and bodily rush I endure while inhaling my entire chocolate calendar on 1 December (cuff me). Therefore, when I went sniffing one scintillating Saturday for some sangers that weren’t born out of a plastic sleeve, I stumbled, like a drunk Santa into a bottle of sherry, into these four beauties.

My man Charlie G [owner of Project Sandwich] certainly knows his way around a bun or two (and here I am restraining all forms of crudity). What’s inside though? Gravy-drowned pork shoulder, sage and crackling stuffing crumb, mustard cabbage and pickled cranberries. For this I’d strongly advise wearing a bib: on the one hand, it’ll serve to protect your finest oxford blue shirt from gushings of gravy and the odd, stray cranberry. On the other, you can treat yourself to a swamp-like dessert after.

Wednesdays at Kerb Street Food Market, West India Quay, Docklands E14 4ED

SAGE-AND-ONION-STUFFING-BATTERED BUTTERMILK CHICKEN! I REPEAT, STUFFING-BATTERED BUTTERMILK CHICKEN! I don’t care about the rest (actually I do) but what a revelation.

Accompanied by a sausage patty, sweet maple bacon and smoked Monterey Jack cheese, I haven’t had such a textural orgasm in ages. It makes me question what else I can batter in stuffing...

Birthdays, 33–35 Stoke Newington Road, N16 5BJ

There’s no denying the fact that I bleed Dusty Knuckle bread – I just can’t get enough of the stuff. Aside from it being a social enterprise, teaching those less fortunate the art of bread-making, their bread makes you want to do a little dance, naked, whistling the tune of Sugar Plum Fairy. Marinated buffalo mozzarella, shredded sprouts, fennel and apple salad and candied walnut. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Abbot Street, E8 3DP

First, I must apologise for the abhorrent photo. I was fighting a losing battle against natural light, and the few jars of amber nectar I inhaled prior to this shot didn’t help matters. Of all the sandwiches I ate, this was the most ‘roast dinner’ in bread and the novelty gravy drenching and popcorn snow went down a treat – faster, even, than the beers. Bloody delicious, I might go back for a better photo: smoked turkey, stuffing patty, buttered sprouts, pickled carrot and red cabbage.

87 Brixton Village Market, SW9 8PS and 21-23 Tooting High Street, SW17 0SN