>> However, I managed to get good bread in London. So it's not completely uniformly bad; just generally bad.

Well, OK, you can find good bread if you get lucky and look for it really hard, but the thing is that the British don't really understand what good bread means. I'm sorry to be racist. I find the same thing about coffee and about most food. The British... they try, right? London is full of posh restaurants. But I really don't think they get it.

>> You can get decent-ish bread in the countries you mentioned, though I think it's all rather white and wheat-y?

You get a whole lot more than "decent-ish" bread in the countries I mentioned! And you don't need to go looking for "artisanal" bread. To my understanding that's a term that's applied to bread made in the UK or US because ordinary bread sucks. But the same is not needed in, e.g., France where there are rules for "pain tradition" ("bread made to tradition"; nothing to do with BDSM :| ) that basically enforce that the bread is made by the baker on the day it is sold. This is a French language site that explains the rules:

https://www.laculturegenerale.com/difference-pain-baguette-t...

To summarise, the dough can't be refrigerated, the bread must be baked on premise and then there's some restrictions on the ingredients (e.g. no additives except fungal amylase).

Btw having rules like that is a very French thing. The French (well, some of them) are very picky about their food and so they have all sorts of standards like AOP (which was a French thing before it was an EU thing) for cheese, wine, pork products and everything else that you can eat really. And that's a good thing and it works: you really should try the bread in France. I get the feeling you haven't - no offence.

Other places like Italy and Greece may not have the same stringent rules so you find more variation (as in all things- e.g. coffee: good in Italy and Greece, passalbe in France, I wouldn't drink it in Belgium or Germany) but for whatever historical and cultural conditions in those countries you're very likely to get very good bread in any random bakery you walk in to.

Like you say white is the mainstay, but in Greece I find that in the last few years that has changed a good deal. Even out in the boondocks where I stay you can find like six or seven varieties of bread per bakery, with white the minority really. My local area has three bakeries, wall-to-wall and the two sell wholemeal, spelt and rye, with and without sourdough. That's partly thanks to the many Albanians who have migrated to Greece in the last few decades and who are master bakers (and stone masons to boot). Also: heavenly pies. Oh man. Now I want one of the "kourou" spinach pikelets with spelt from the Albanian bakery and I'm stuck in the UK :(

Btw, that Albanian bakery also makes bread without salt. In a couple different varieties. I've tried their wholemeal sourdough (I have family with health issues so). Not great but eh, it's without salt. Greece gets very hot in the summer (40+ degrees is unsurprising) but the salt-less bread works just as fine. After all, this is modern times: we can control the temperature and humidity of enclosed spaces, yes? Salt is not needed for preservation anymore, it's now only there for the taste. So I'm very suspicious of industries that claim they can't reduce the salt content of their products "because preservation". As far as I'm concerned, any such claims make me suspicious of a cover-up; specifically that extra salt is used to cover up poor ingredients and poor production.