Few things could be quite so evocative as the memory of childhood greed sharpened by the jarring, tinny sound of Waltzing Matilda or Greensleeves heard several streets away. Ice-cream as soft as raw meringue, piped with a flourish into an orange cone the consistency of cardboard. The creamy swirl impaled by a crisp, and friable chocolate flake. Sticky fingers as the sweet vanilla melts over small hands. The ice-cream van is as much a trope of suburban British nostalgia as warm beer, cricket on the green and endless summers – notwithstanding a rather less cheerful association with Glasgow’s notorious ice-cream wars of the early 1980s, in which ice-cream vans were used to “fence” stolen goods and to sell drugs.

But the ice-cream van in its traditional form is increasingly out of tune with the times. The vans emit black carbon and nitrogen dioxide because they need to keep their engines on to power their onboard freezers. In Britain’s most polluted urban areas this is a problem. In London, Camden council has announced that it will more vigorously enforce regulations it has already established to ban trading in certain streets. Westminster council is also trying to tackle the problem of idling vehicles near school gates and in other public spaces.

Ice-cream vans are a particular part of British culture. They are as the traditional boozer is to the gastropub: cheap and cheerful, dependable and unpretentious. But just as pub culture has changed, so ice-cream culture is transforming in many British towns and cities. At the cheaper end of the market, supermarkets are undercutting ice-cream vans as sources of treats on a sunny day. Stores selling Italian-style gelato are springing up, admittedly sometimes with prices that would cause any self-respecting Italian – used to decent, reasonably priced ice-cream on every street corner – to back away. Along with nail bars, bookstores, coffee shops and craft beer bars, ice-cream parlours are a rare growing sector on British high streets, according to research published last year by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The new breed of high-quality ice-cream emporium will also cater to the swelling ranks of vegans; young Muslims are increasingly enjoying dessert bars, which offer a congenial, alcohol-free place to gather in the evening.

Despite this newfangled competition, ice-cream vans will surely survive, even if largely as a self-conscious act of nostalgia – queueing half-ironically for an ice-cream is an amusement in demand at weddings and corporate events. Meantime, some councils are already installing electric power sources on popular streets and beside parks so that ice-cream vans can continue to operate without peril to the lungs of the local inhabitants. The charms of Mr Whippy and melting ice lollies need not entirely be lost to a fresh generation. Still, for the truly nostalgic, maybe it is time to revert to the era before ice-cream vans: when Wall’s ice-cream was sold on the streets from an unimpeachably green and unpolluting mode of transport, the tricycle.