Reality check with Juliette Jowit

Ice cream vans: an extinct species?

As the heatwave continues, our favourite way of cooling off is in short supply, according to a press report last week. But is it true?
Ice cream vans in Whitechapel
An apparently miraculous sighting of two ice cream vans together. Photograph: Guardian

The tinny strains of Greensleeves sped up blast through the neighbourhood. Quick! Put on your shoes and grab your pocket money. Flail your arms at the chubby man leaning out of the window of the van. Those were the days!

But sadly this is now a thing of the past for most of us if there's any truth to the claim that there are now 99.8% fewer ice cream vans on the UK's roads.

If you've seen an ice cream van lately, consider yourself lucky. The Telegraph claimed last week that there are only 500 of them left, out of the 34.5m vehicles on the road in the UK. That's one in 69,000.

If that wasn't a sad enough figure, the article claims that in their 1970s heyday, there were 250,000 of these vans on the road. With around 15m licensed vehicles on the UK roads in the 1970s, that would mean 1 in 60 vehicles could sell you an ice cream. Did such happy days really exist?

It appears that the source of the numbers is a company called Joe Delucci's Gelato, which sells its ice cream in, er, Tesco. It was unable to tell us where it got its figures from. Unless having two ice cream vans in the UK qualifies you as an expert, Joe Delucci's Gelato seems like a slightly flake-y source to be providing the numbers. So we've looked for a few others.

More like 2,500

The Food Standards Agency has inspection data for 13,460 mobile caterers in the UK - of which 426 have the words 'icecream' or 'ice cream' in their business name - though many ice cream vans may not be so explicitly christened as Annie's Antics, Ice Baby and Vintage Scoops demonstrate.

There's also an open collaboration to map the UK's ice cream vans and tricycles - although the lack of entries so far would seem to confirm rather than refute the Joe Delucci's Gelato statistics.

View Ice Cream network in a larger map Some of England and Wales' roaming ice cream sellers. Click to see detail

Whitby Morrison is the UK's (and it believes the world's) largest manufacturer of ice cream vans. A company that began in 1962, it produced 200 of these this year - though 25% of those were sent abroad and that total also includes ice cream tricycles and kiosks.

Antonio Coronato, sales manager at Whitby Morrison, explained "that 200 units has been quite static since the turn of the millennium". But those new products are added to the stock of ice cream vans already in circulation.

Newly produced vehicles make up around 0.8% of all vehicles on the road. If the ratios are the same, Whitby's output suggests that there are around 2,500 in circulation. That doesn't seem too outlandish seeing as there are over 50 used ice cream vans for sale on Whitby Morrison's site, and dozens listed on sites like eBay and Gumtree.

There was also some scepticism about the quarter of a million vans that were supposedly treating us to their tinny music in the past - Coronato said "there were certainly more in the 70s but that does seem a lot". The 250,000 number seems to be made up. We can find no source for it.

So it seems that while there may have been a decline in UK ice cream vans, the 'from' and 'to' have been over and underestimated, giving a more startling percentage decrease.

Do you find it hard to get your frozen fix? Think that there was an abundance of ice cream vans in your younger days? Do you know where the 250,000 number comes from? Tell us by posting a comment below or tweeting to @GuardianData.

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