Welcome to the Cooks Livery Company
The Worshipful Company of Cooks of London is the smallest of London’s livery companies at 75 Liverymen strong.
The Company is also one of the oldest livery companies. It can trace its origins back to the 12th Century, founded from two guilds of cooks in medieval London - the Cooks of Eastcheap and the Cooks of Bread Street. The Cooks Livery received its first charter in 1482, and is now thirty-fifth in the City’s Livery table of precedence.
Today, the Company is as vital as it was when it controlled all catering within the ‘Square Mile’. The Company is no longer an association of tradesmen in its original controlling sense. Yet, its present membership continues to include craft tradesmen, while the Company as a whole engages actively with a broad range of organisations and charities associated with cooking. Thus, the Company’s purpose in contemporary times has come to rest in a public search for the common good, to be socially useful, and to contribute as effectively as it can to the pursuit of a good society - all through support to the craft of cooking.
