Tony Roach has been selling ice-cream in Eastbourne for 40 years – as his father did before him. But can he survive the extraordinary decline of the ice-cream van?

You are only allowed to play the ice-cream jingle for a maximum of 12 seconds, when the van is approaching its destination. But Tony Roach flicks off the Popeye tune after only a moment’s airtime. “That wasn’t 12 seconds!” I wail. Roach blinks and looks at me oddly, then promises to play it for longer next time. There’s something about ice-cream vans that brings out the child in all of us.

I’m riding shotgun in a pink-and-cream 2009 Whitby Morrison Millennium, accompanying Roach on the same round of Eastbourne, his hometown, that he has been doing for 40 years. The weather is warm, the sky is cloudless. Humming the Popeye tune under my breath, I help myself to another flake from the box above the fridge. It’s going to be a good day.

Known to all as Ice-Cream Tony, 57-year-old Roach learned to scoop practically before he could walk. His father, Paul, was in the trade. “All I can remember is ice-cream vans,” says Roach. “From the age of six, I was going with my dad in the ice-cream van and helping. It’s all I wanted to do.” Paul taught him how to repair the refrigeration units and the engine. Most mechanics won’t touch ice-cream vans because they are complex vehicles, so, like an astronaut going into space, you have to be prepared to fix everything yourself. After his father died, Roach restored his 1972 Bedford CF Morrison van. It was an emotional task. “He was a great geezer. An ice-cream man through and through.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Roach. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Roach bought his first van, a 1965 Bedford CA, for £500 in 1979. He follows Paul’s route from the 60s. The streets might be the same, but the days in which ice-cream vans were a staple of local communities are gone. According to the trade body, the Ice Cream Alliance, there are between 2,500 and 5,000 vans operational in the UK, but only 10% of them do street trading. In the 50s, there were 20,000. “We had a lot of competition in those days,” says Roach. “Now, street trading is dying.”

The past five years have been the worst, even as ice-cream parlours are one of a handful of growing sectors on the high street; a PricewaterhouseCooper report found that their number rose by 20% in 2017. Roach blames the downturn on supermarkets selling ice-cream so cheaply, but competition is not the only reason. Children don’t play outdoors as much as they used to; you can’t hear the chimes of an approaching ice-cream van over the pinball whirr of an iPad. And don’t get Roach started on Jamie Oliver’s war on unhealthy eating: “That didn’t help at all,” he says grimly.

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We pull up at our first stop, Roselands infant school, where parents are loitering outside. Roach switches off the engine and we sit there with the hum of the Carpigiani soft-serve machine for company. I feel like a lion watching my prey. The bell rings. Children flood out.

Watching Roach spring into action is marvellous. If, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed, it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in any given field, then Roach – who works seven days a week from the February half-term until October, 6am to 11pm – is a master 10 times over. He is the grandmaster of soft-serve; Don Whippy; King Cone.

But fewer people are buying ice-cream than I thought. It’s murder at the infant school, and the primary school further down the road, and the third stop, a local park. In two hours, we sell maybe 20 ice-creams in total. At the park, Roach is anxious to tell me that, the day before, the queue was 20 minutes long.

It’s not that the product is bad – it’s delicious. Roach uses a fresh milk mix from Mediterranean Ices, and is snobbish about providers who make their ice-cream from UHT. “I can always taste a UHT mix. You notice it when they’re walking away from the ice-cream van. You see how it runs down the edges? It’s melting. That doesn’t happen with fresh mix.” I look down at the cone I’ve been holding absent-mindedly, and he’s right – no drip.

But people don’t have as much money to spend as before. Outside Stafford school, a child whines that his cone isn’t big enough. “That’s all the money we have,” says his mother, exasperated. “I’m not having anything for myself!” Later, at the Kingsmere estate, 40-year-old Christina Ward looks at the menu and says: “It’s well expensive, isn’t it?” Roach’s kindly mien slips for a moment behind his wraparound shades. “It’s only £2,” he retorts. Ward relents and buys three cones.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Although Roach’s products are keenly priced – £2 for a small cone with flake, up to £3 for a large – if you have a few kids, that’s not much change from a tenner. Almost everyone buys small cones now, whereas before they would buy big ones, says Roach. “Since Brexit, people have less money, and less confidence in spending money. They haven’t got the money in their pockets they had a few years ago.” (Eastbourne voted to leave the EU.) As sales falter, Roach has diversified away from street trading, towards events, which are more lucrative.

Turning ice-cream vans into a novelty for corporate dos and wedding receptions is a social loss; after so many years spent chugging around suburban streets, Roach is part of the fabric of his community. He knows Eastbourne’s circadian rhythms: what time the schools get out, when families eat their tea and where children play outside (if they play outside at all – the period after teatime used to be his busiest, but now kids stay in).

Often, as punters approach the van, he tells me their orders. “He’s going to ask for three medium cones with a flake,” Roach says of one older gentleman in a check shirt. (He does.) We serve 17-year-old Brendan Brooks, whose mother bought from Roach as a young girl. In Langley, retired train driver John Carney, 66, has been a customer for 20 years. “He brings the kids out, and they can see each other, because nowadays we don’t let children outside, they’re inside being cocooned ... And the mums and dads come out, so it’s a chance for us to have a chat, too.”

From his vantage point on Eastbourne’s quiet cul-de-sacs, Roach sees social change up close – such as how people don’t carry cash any more. “Two or three years ago, if someone said I’d be taking cards, I wouldn’t believe it! But now you have to.” He’s an expert on Britain’s changing palates. Recently, people have started asking for vegan ice-cream. Roach doesn’t have any, but he does have dog ice-cream – not because dogs are more deserving than vegans, but because he did a dog show last week. Roach has observed more worrying trends, too, such as the climate emergency. “We’re having different weather than we had 20 years ago,” he says darkly. “The weather’s changing ... we get very hot spells and then very wet spells.” The Goldilocks weather for selling ice-cream, incidentally, is 21C, says Roach: “That’s just nice. I don’t like it too hot ... people can get a bit grumpy when it’s too hot.”

But as our summers buzz longer and hotter, there is one constant: we Brits absolutely love soft-serve ice-cream. “People’s tastes change. But they can’t resist a 99.” Mr Whippy is British culture. “Other countries just don’t get it. It’s a British thing. It’ll be raining on a bank holiday, but we’ll still have an ice-cream. It’s one of those things only British people understand.”

Soft-serve ice-cream is actually an American import. Mister Softee came to the UK in the 50s, but it wasn’t long before we concocted a homegrown rival, Mr Whippy, which was founded in Birmingham in 1958. Mr Whippy is the ultimate leveller, beloved by celebrities – Roach has served Piers Morgan and Davina McCall – and ordinary folk alike. Tony Blair wrote in his 2010 biography, A Journey, about being forced by spin doctors to buy cones for himself and Gordon Brown during the 2005 election trail. (Blair is not a fan.)

Mr Whippy is elemental nostalgia. “Bing-bong, bingety bongety bong,” wrote Simon Schama in a 2007 Vogue essay. “Mr Whippy is calling, and we, short-trousered, snake-belted, grimy-kneed, snot-nosed, want what he’s got. We want a 99, God, how we want it.” You only need to hear the opening bars of Greensleeves and you’re nine years old again, scrambling for change then bolting barefoot out of the door. “Every time you heard that song played, even when you were little, you knew he was there,” says 44-year-old restaurant worker Stephen Humphreys, handing his daughter Aaliyah a cone. He bought from Roach as a child. “Quick, get the money together, leg it there before he goes.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Being an ice-cream man has kept Roach young. He credits his sprightliness to eating ice-cream every day for 40 years. He rarely goes on holiday, but when he does, the first thing he does is have a local ice-cream. (“It’s always rubbish. Not as good as mine.”) In winter, Roach restores vintage vans – he has a fleet of 12. At the beachfront, we bump into his wife, Yvonne – they have been married for 25 years. She confirms that ice-cream is not just a livelihood for Roach – he picked her up for their first date in the van. A self-styled “ice-cream widow”, Yvonne says Roach was meant to retire at 50, but keeps putting it off. “It’s never going to happen, and I’ve accepted it.” Yvonne asks her husband for a cone. “I hope you’ve got some money on you!” he says.

During a lull, Roach shows me the trick to making the perfect Mr Whippy: you rotate the cone in a circle, then pull it away from the machine to create the point. (I am lousy.) At the Kingsmere estate, we sell three ice-creams and a slush puppy to 51-year-old reiki master Russell Dobson. “When they hear the noise,” Dobson says, gesturing to his son, “you tell them: ‘There’s none left.’” “You can’t do that!” Roach exclaims. “That’s what everyone tells them,” Dobson says. “Did you not know that?” (Later, at a playground, a girl of about five or six runs up to the van and asks if we’ve sold out. When Roach shakes his head, she looks confused, then enraged.)

The day draws on and Roach and I drive through quietening residential streets, past pebbledash houses and trampolines and garden gnomes. There are mums with prams, dads in tracksuits and flip-flops, children in school uniforms on scooters – so many scooters, more scooters than I’ve ever seen before. Women come out of houses in bathrobes with wet hair and buy ice-cream to take indoors.

Tony Roach holds Eastbourne together with engine grease and dairy cream. Like his father before him, he is an ice-cream man through and through – but he may well be among the last. Roach is at the heart of a dying trade, and a rapidly melting community. It occurs to me that this may be the fictitious Arcadia that Brexiters want: communities where the ice-cream man knows your name and your order, and your mother’s order before yours, and her grandmother’s order before that, probably. They have been searching for it, but it’s already here. This summer, at least.