I wasn't looking up wheelbarrows, but checking how to spell "whelk" (whether it was "welk," and it is not), for writing a bit about how Koreans use toilet paper for napkins and nose wipe and all else. Or they did when it was a poorer country and not a family might use tissues (like Kleenex) for everything from paper towels to butt-wipe.
Anyway, I found this:
Take a peek under the whelk's shell, however, and you'll find it to be quite an eccentric little chap. Sold out of wheelbarrows in Victorian London, the whelk was a popular street food in the poorer neighbourhoods of Whitechapel and Lambeth...
Times, of course, have changed. No one would dream of eating street food from a wheelbarrow.
(Quote from: Whelks are healthy, versatile and sustainable, so why did we stop eating them in the UK?)
Seafood with a shell, from a wheelbarrow, brings to mind the song "Molly Malone, which starts:
In Dublin's fair city, where girls are so pretty
I first laid my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she wheeled her wheelbarrow, through streets dark and narrow,
Crying "Cockels and mussle, alive, alive-o"
She's usually shown with a flat, wooden hand cart, in images I've seen in music books, and a statue they have in Dublin now.
