Mrs Beightons Traditional Sweet Shop in Haworth

Yorkshire Post

It was set up in 1973 as a sweet shop by Mrs Beightons, who ran the shop for around 25 years before she retired and passed it on.  The building itself used to be a chemist and post office prior to being a sweet shop and is likely to date back to around the 1800s.

Transcript

00:00Would you mind introducing yourself? Who are you and whereabouts are we?

00:04I'm Thomas Hayes and we're at Mrs Beaton's sweet shop in Haworth.

00:08Can you just tell us a bit about the history of the place?

00:10So Mrs Beaton's has been a sweet shop since around 1973.

00:16Prior to that it was a chemist and a post office.

00:23Mrs Beaton ran the sweet shop for around about 20 to 30 years.

00:29And then it was taken over by Alan and Wendy Breeze in 2011.

00:33And Alan and Wendy ran that for 13 years and extended the sweet shop

00:38and brought in the online side and the hampers and the gifting.

00:42And then Alan and Wendy Breeze decided to retire in 2024,

00:47then I took over and purchased the shop from them in April 2024.

00:53And in this time that you've been here, how have you found it?

00:56Great, good fun, hard work, but a lot of fun.

01:01I mean, who doesn't want to work with sweets, you know?

01:04Actually seeing people's faces and reactions when they come in to the sweet shop

01:09because it brings back childhood memories.

01:11So that's what the thrill of it is.

01:14And, you know, it puts a smile on people's faces and adults as well coming in here.

01:21And, you know, seeing people have that reaction to the childhood memories is phenomenal.

01:28So I enjoy it.

01:29And the demographic must be huge.

01:32Yes. So we have a lot of tourists that come into Howarth and people are amazed by the vintage look of it.

01:42It's everything from, you know, small children.

01:47We get the after school rush on a Friday from Howarth Primary School.

01:51We have our locals. We have the visitors that come to Howarth.

01:55The weekends are very, very busy.

01:57And then obviously on the themed weekends, like the 1940s and the Steampunk weekend, we get a lot of visitors there.

02:06And it's just a fun place to work.

02:09I suppose you describe yourself as a traditional sweet shop.

02:12Yes.

02:13What do you sell?

02:16I mean, describe the sweets that you do sell.

02:20So a lot of the sweets that we sell cannot be sourced or obtained in supermarkets.

02:27Some of them can, obviously, but we try to keep some of the old classics in place.

02:32So some of these sweets that we have in the jars were originally made in the 1940s.

02:37So things like fairy satins and tea cakes and coconut toasties and various others.

02:45So we have a lot of sweets that are still made to this day, but they're not really.

02:52You can't obtain them at a normal traditional supermarket and like a normal corner shop.

02:59It's just the traditional sweet shops that sell these now.

03:02And a lot of them are quite made locally, aren't they?

03:05Yes, a lot of them are made in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

03:07We've got a few sweets that are made abroad, but most of them are made within the Lancashire and Yorkshire area.

03:14So yes, you are buying British for the sweets.

03:18And popularity wise?

03:20Still popular today as they were 40, 50 years ago.

03:24Everybody likes a sweet, you know, so.

03:27And what are people's favourite and what is your favourite? Do you like sweets?

03:32Yeah, I love sweets, yeah.

03:35So yeah, I've got a very big sweet tooth, but it's kind of dulled down a little bit since I took on this place, as you can imagine.

03:42But my favourite, I like a good sherbet lemon.

03:46The most popular ones are the pear drops, rhubarb and custard, midget gems by far.

03:52And those are the proper midget gems, where the blacks are licorice.

03:55And you have pontefract cakes.

04:04So yeah, those are the main ones.

04:07And where do you see yourself going? Do you want the place to change at all?

04:12No.

04:13No.

04:14So it's going to keep that same vintage feel.

04:16If anything, we're going to enhance it.

04:18We may be looking at doing some remodeling next year, but it will be more to enhance the look and the feel of the vintage.

04:24The next plan for us is to extend the online side, because we have a big online presence.

04:30And that's my background, so I want to update that and extend that further and, you know, bring that out more.

04:40So yeah.

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