One of London’s most loved bakeries is heading to Finsbury Park. The Dusty Knuckle, the sourdough specialist that grew from a shipping container in Dalston into a national name, is opening a third permanent bakery on Blackstock Road.
The business is taking over the former Il Cavaliere Italian restaurant at 81 Blackstock Road, with the new bakery rumoured to be opening its doors in November. It will be the company’s third bricks-and-mortar home, joining its original Dalston site and a second bakery on Green Lanes in Harringay.
From a Dalston car park to Green Lanes
For anyone who has queued for one of the Dusty Knuckle’s doorstep sandwiches or carried a crackling sourdough loaf home on the bus, the news will come as little surprise. Back in 2014, founders Max Tobias, Rebecca Oliver and Daisy Terry fired up their first ovens in a Dalston car park. Four years later they moved into a permanent home behind the Arcola Theatre, and in 2021 they added a second site on Green Lanes in Harringay — with a van café on Highbury Fields along the way.
Over the past decade the bakery has become a fixture on lists of the country’s best bakeries, famous for its sourdough, baked pastries and doorstep sarnies. But it is the social mission stitched into the business that sets it apart: the Dusty Knuckle trains and mentors young people who face barriers to employment, giving them professional baking skills and a route into work. The Blackstock Road opening extends that work into another north London neighbourhood.
What the Dusty Knuckle has planned for Blackstock Road
Planning papers approved by Hackney Council on September 25 give the clearest picture yet of what is coming. The application, lodged in July by Max Tobias of The Dusty Knuckle Kitchen, sets out new double-glazed timber doors with a fanlight, a “traditional Victorian awning”, pink granite plinths and a freshly painted sign carrying the company logo and the words “The Dusty Knuckle Bakery”.
Inside, the floor plan shows a restaurant, bakery and café across the front of the building, with the kitchen tucked away at the rear. That layout points to more than a grab-and-go counter: at Harringay the bakery serves all-day breakfasts, lunches, soups and salads, with pizza in the evenings, and regulars will be hoping Blackstock Road gets a similar treatment.
Why the Dusty Knuckle suits Blackstock Road
The new arrival is a coup for a street that has quietly become one of the capital’s essential food destinations. Blackstock Road runs north from Highbury up towards Finsbury Park, and last year Time Out named it one of the coolest streets in the world — praising its heady blend of global cultures, independent food spots and an old-meets-new mix of natural wine bars and speciality coffee shops beside traditional pubs, greasy spoons and a local butcher.
Walk its length and the billing makes sense. Kurdish, Turkish and Ethiopian restaurants jostle for space with BookBar — part bookshop, part drinking spot — and a Nourished Communities grocery, each adding to a high street that feels genuinely, stubbornly local. A bakery of the Dusty Knuckle’s standing slots neatly into that story.
The opening also lands at an interesting moment for London’s bakery trade. While some high-street chains have been shutting branches — including a Greggs bakery in Clapham that closed its doors for good — independent names with loyal neighbourhood followings keep expanding. And with hundreds of bakery jobs under threat elsewhere in the capital, a growing business built on training new bakers is a welcome counterpoint.
For Finsbury Park, the new bakery adds another reason to linger. The streets around the station have changed enormously in recent years, but Blackstock Road has kept its independent character — and a queue out of the door for sourdough would suit it just fine. If the rumoured November opening comes off, the smell of fresh bread could be drifting down Blackstock Road before Christmas.
