The Great British Bake Off Series 14: Recap, Bakes and Winner

Spoiler note: this recap names the winner of Great British Bake Off series 14.

Series 14 of The Great British Bake Off aired from September 26 to November 28, 2023, and it introduced Alison Hammond as co-host alongside Noel Fielding, taking over from Matt Lucas. Twelve bakers entered the tent for the ten-episode run. The full show record lives on our Great British Bake Off hub.

How the format worked in series 14

The weekly structure carried over exactly as fans expect from a new hosting era: a Signature bake for personal style, a Technical challenge where every contestant works from an identical, deliberately stripped-down recipe and is ranked blind by the judges, and a Showstopper to close the episode as the week's most ambitious bake. Alison Hammond's arrival changed the tone between challenges considerably, but the challenges themselves, and the criteria the judges scored against, stayed the same as they had for thirteen series before her.

The final and the winner

Matty Edgell, a 28-year-old PE and science teacher from Cambridgeshire, won series 14, beating Josh Smalley and Dan Hunter in the final.

Edgell taught PE and science at Hampton College in Peterborough before the show, holding degrees in sports coaching and physical education alongside a PGCE in secondary education. His baking grounding came from time spent with his grandmother growing up, a hobby he kept going quietly alongside a full teaching career until his win. He went on to move into culinary education work after the series aired.

The full series 14 lineup

Hometowns and the shape of the cast

Two of the twelve bakers, Cristy Sharp and Amos Lilley, were based in London, with the rest of the cast drawn from Cambridgeshire, the Midlands, and as far as Cumbria. Matty Edgell's Peterborough base kept the winner's hometown within the eastern England cluster that has produced several champions across this run, and his day job as a PE and science teacher made him one of the few winners covered here whose profession is fully confirmed rather than inferred from hometown or general public reporting.

Judges, hosts, and a few standout details

Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith judged, with Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond hosting together for the first time. The cast's age range spanned Rowan Claughton, at 21, the youngest baker of the series, up to Keith Barron, at 60. Series 14 is worth watching for that hosting handover alone, as Hammond's first run set the tone for the version of the show still airing today.

A quieter series after two turbulent years

Compared to the hosting change of the previous series and the pandemic disruption of series 11, series 14 played out as a relatively straightforward run once the new hosting pair had settled in. That stability let the judging and format take center stage again, with less press attention on behind-the-scenes changes and more on the bakes themselves, a pattern that continued into the two series that followed.

If you're working through the archive

Series 14 kicks off the Alison Hammond era that followed series 13, Matt Lucas's last, and it leads directly into series 15 the following year. The full breakdown of every host and judge era is in our Bake Off fan guide, and every champion since 2010 is listed in every Great British Bake Off winner. A sturdy baking sheet is one of the least glamorous but most-used pieces of kit behind almost every bake this series.