00:00I'm Thomas Hayes and we're at Mrs Beaton's Sweet Shop in Howarth.
00:04I took it over in April 2024 and it was, I had a previous business which I was downsizing
00:13and looking to dissolve and I was looking for something else to get into and I saw this
00:18come up for sale and basically went, oh yeah, quite fancy a sweet shop.
00:23So I did some investigation and I was just in the right place at the right time and took
00:28it on.
00:28So Mrs Beaton's has been a sweet shop since around 1973.
00:33Prior to that it was a chemist and a post office.
00:39Mrs Beaton ran the sweet shop for around about 20 to 30 years and then it was taken over by
00:47Alan and Wendy Breeze in 2011 and Alan and Wendy ran that for 13 years and extended the sweet
00:53shop and brought in the online side and the hampers and the gifting and then Alan and Wendy
01:01Breeze decided to retire in 2024.
01:03Then I took over and purchased the shop from them in April 2024.
01:08Great, good fun, hard work, but a lot of fun. I mean, who doesn't want to work with sweets?
01:15You know, and actually seeing people's faces and reactions when they come in to the sweet
01:21shop because it brings back childhood memories. So that's what the thrill of it is. And, you
01:29know, it puts a smile on people's faces and adults as well coming in here. And, you know, it's seeing
01:38people have that reaction to the childhood memories is phenomenal. So I enjoy it. A lot of tourists
01:44that come into Haworth and people are amazed by the vintage look of it, as well as a lot of visitors
01:50who come into Haworth and it's everything, everything from, you know, small children. We get the after
01:58school rush on a Friday from Haworth primary school. We have our locals, we have the visitors
02:04that come to Haworth. The weekends are very, very busy. And then obviously on the themed weekends like
02:11the 1940s and the Steampunk weekend, we get a lot of visitors there and it's just a fun place to work.
02:18So a lot of the sweets that we sell cannot be sourced or obtained in supermarkets. Some of them can,
02:27obviously, but we try to keep some of the old classics in place. So some of these sweets that
02:32we have in the jars were originally made in the 1940s. So things like fairy satins and tea cakes and
02:41coconut toasties and various others. So we have a lot of sweets that are still made to this day,
02:49but they're not really, you can't obtain them at a normal traditional supermarket and like a normal corner shop.
02:57It's just the traditional sweet shops that sell these now. A lot of them are made in Lancashire and Yorkshire.
03:03We've got a few sweets that are made abroad, but most of them are made within the Lancashire and Yorkshire area.
03:10Still popular today as they were 40, 50 years ago. Everybody likes a sweet, you know, so.
03:16So 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,
03:22as you can imagine. But my favourite, I like a good sherbet lemon. The most popular ones are the
03:30pear drops, rhubarb and custard, midget gems by far. And those are the proper midget gems with the black
03:36slipperish. And we have pontefract cakes. So yeah, those are the main ones. So it's going to keep that
03:50same vintage feel. If anything, we're going to enhance it. We may be looking at doing some remodeling
03:56next year, but it'd be more to enhance the look and the feel of the vintage. The next plan for us is to
04:02extend the online side because we have a big online presence and that's my background. So I want to
04:10update that and extend that further and, you know, bring that out more. So, yeah.
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