Mrs Beighton's Sweet Shop Haworth

Yorkshire Post

Tom Heys who took over the traditional sweet shop Mrs Beighton's on Main Street, Haworth 18 months ago. The shop sells sweets mainly made in Yorkshire and Lancashire. It's thought that the sweet shop dates from the early 1980's, before that a chemist and the Post Office.

Transcript

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.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended