'The white chips of Dover': Artist uses food for famous UK landmarks

A food artist has created tasty sculptures of some of Britain's most iconic landmarks - from potato chips and mushy peas.

Prudence Staite and her team used 10kg of chips to make edible versions of the London Eye, Big Ben, Stonehenge and the Angel of the North.

Some of the designs required a lot of effort, with the Angel of the North sculpture taking 12 hours and 240 chips to produce.

However the famous Dover cliffs - dubbed the 'White Chips of Dover' - needed only 70 chips and just seven were used to create the Loch Ness Monster.

Mushy peas, another British staple, act as grass in some of the edible attractions.

Prudence said that her 'chip art' relied on the 'perfect combination' of chip shop chips and oven chips for each scuplture.

'We had so much fun with this project, from the very first sketches to the technical challenges around how the sculptures would hold together.

'Iconic landmarks in Britain are so important to our cultural history and eating chips is such a British tradition that it felt natural to combine the two and create some history of our own.

'It did leave us a little hungry though!'

The Potato Council commissioned the edible art to celebrate Chip Week 2014, which runs from 17th-23rd February.

Stu Baker, of the Potato Council, said: 'Britain is truly a nation of chip lovers and Chip Week is a fantastic celebration of our great food tradition.

'We always enjoy the creativity and ingenuity that Chip Week tends to inspire and Prudence has certainly taken it to a whole new level.

'So why not go to your local chippy and have a try yourself?'

Brits spend an average of £4.8 million a week on fish and chips, with 250 million meals sold in the UK each year.

In a survey of 2,000 people by the Potato Council, 56 per cent said they regularly buy the meal to have with their families, with a fifth of Brits sharing a fish supper on a first date.

Britain boasts 10,500 specialist fish and chip shops, and the industry employs 65,000 people. More than 1.6 million tonnes of potatoes are turned into chips every year.