There are few sounds in Britain capable of producing quite such immediate domestic chaos as an ice cream van jingle during hot weather. Children abandon whatever they are doing, parents begin searching pockets and diving into sofa cushions, and somebody is sent sprinting down the road before “Greensleeves” disappears around the corner.

By the time the family reaches the hatch, sees £3.50 beside the picture of a 99 and the mood changes. Three pounds fifty? For that?

It is a peculiar outrage, not least because the same adults may later stand in a beautifully tiled gelateria and hand over £5 without raising an eyebrow.

A small cone at the French gelato “boutique” chain Amorino costs £4.70, rising to £5.70 for a regular and as much as £7.90 for a large. At Marcelo’s in southeast London, one scoop of smoked maple pecan or peanut butter and date jam is £3.90; two cost £6.50. At the Dreamery, Hackney’s natural-wine-and-ice-cream bar, oolong and prune flavours are £4 a scoop.

Elsewhere, two scoops cost £6.50 at Gelupo in Soho, up to £7 at Ice Cream Union and £5.40 at Alfonso Gelateria in Stow-on-the-Wold. Brickell’s charges £4 from its summer scoop hut in Bath.

Put ice cream in a tasteful paper cup, call it small-batch and mention Sicilian lemons, and the price becomes an affordable luxury. Dispense soft serve into a wafer cone, stick a Flake in it and suddenly it’s daylight robbery.

This is the strange fate of the 99: the cheaper ice cream has become the one that feels more expensive.

Our appetite for elaborate frozen desserts has continued to grow. The number of ice cream parlours in Britain rose by more than 200 to 1,015 in two years, while nearly 700 dessert cafes and parlours opened over the decade to 2025.

The traditional ice cream van has travelled in the opposite direction. Britain had about 20,000 operators in the 1950s. Today, it’s estimated that fewer than a quarter remain. The jingle may still be part of summer’s soundtrack, but it’s heard far less often than it once was.

Part of that decline is straightforward. Supermarkets sell boxes of lollies and cones for less than the price of one from a van. Children spend less time playing in the street. Councils have restricted where vans can trade. The British weather continues to behave as though it has a personal grievance against anyone whose livelihood depends on sunshine.

And despite the apparent simplicity of the product, running a van is not just a matter of buying ice cream mix and finding a lay-by. One operator recently put annual fuel costs at £12,000, vehicle insurance at £1,200 per van and servicing for two soft-serve machines at £1,500. Tender fees for pitches can range from £1,000 to £30,000 a year. In Seaford, one promenade concession was awarded this year for £82,500 over three years.

Ice cream is also standard-rated for VAT. For a registered seller, roughly 58p of a £3.50 cone goes in tax before the cone, mix, fuel, wages, insurance and pitch have been paid for – then add a Flake on top of that. The National Living Wage is now £12.71 an hour. Then there are the days when the sky turns grey, the park empties and an afternoon’s trade melts away.

None of this means every £4.50 Mr Whippy represents unimpeachable value. A van at a festival or tourist attraction may be charging partly for a costly pitch and partly because it has a captive audience. Occasionally an ice cream is expensive because the seller knows there is nowhere else to buy one nearby.

But the anger cannot be explained by price alone. It comes from what the 99 represents.

Mr Whippy is too costly to remain the pocket-money treat of memory, but too familiar to acquire the glamour of a small-batch scoop

Street ice cream was built as a democratic pleasure. Victorian vendors sold penny licks from small reusable glasses. Wall’s began with 10 ice cream tricycles in 1922 and had 8,500 on the road by 1939. Later, the van brought the treat directly to residential streets, with no need for a day at the seaside or a restaurant booking. You heard the music, fetched some change and bought whatever your pocket money allowed.

It belongs to the same mental category as meat and two veg, penny sweets, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper and the £1 cinema ticket: things people know cannot possibly cost what they once did, but resent having modern prices attached to all the same.

Gelato arrives with none of that baggage. It has been expertly repositioned as craftsmanship. The flavours now have provenance. The pistachios are Italian, the chocolate has a percentage, and the strawberries may have been roasted.

At Gelupo, flavours include strawberry Eton mess, rice pudding and chocolate with Earl Grey and biscuits. At Brickell’s, ricotta stracciatella and roasted strawberries sit where raspberry ripple once did.

There are stainless steel tubs, tasteful menus and often a queue, which is the most effective sign in modern Britain that something must be worth paying for.

The shop is selling somewhere to go as much as something to eat. A £5 scoop can stand in for a pudding, a coffee, a cocktail or half an hour with a friend. It feels like hospitality. The Dreamery can sell you natty wine with your prune ice cream. A van hands over a cone through a window and drives off.

There is also the matter of visible effort. Gelato is scooped with a flourish from a cabinet of jewel-coloured flavours. Mr Whippy emerges from a machine in seconds, making it appear almost costless, no matter what the van required to buy, insure and park.

Perhaps that is why the 99 – which now costs anything but – is in danger. It is caught between supermarket ice cream, which really can still be cheap, and artisan gelato, which has persuaded customers that expense is evidence of quality, rather than evidence they are being ripped off. Mr Whippy is too costly to remain the pocket-money treat of memory, but too familiar to acquire the glamour of a small-batch scoop.

Britain has not stopped wanting ice cream. In a hot summer, we will queue around the block for it and happily pay £5, or more, for flavours involving olive oil, sourdough or tea. What we have lost is the belief that an ice cream van can charge a modern price without somehow betraying us all.

In other words, gelato has been allowed to grow up. The 99 is still expected to live on pocket money.