The oldest sweet shop in England

Pateley Bridge is a small market town in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire, on the River Nidd. On its High Street is a shop that has been selling sweets since 1827. It calls itself The Oldest Sweet Shop, and in 2014 Guinness World Records agreed, listing it in that year's book as the oldest continuously trading sweet shop in the world.

Nearly two hundred years of sweets

The shop says it has traded without a break since 1827, which means it was already selling sweets ten years before Queen Victoria came to the throne. Trading without a break since then means it kept going through two world wars and the years of sweet rationing that followed the second. The building is older still: it dates from 1661, one of the earliest buildings in the town, and it keeps many original features.

Sweets the old way

Inside you find floor to ceiling glass jars and old fashioned scales. The traditional boiled sweets are still weighed out loose, by the quarter pound: humbugs, pear drops, rhubarb and custards and sherbet lemons, alongside fudge and chocolates. The shop says many of its sweets are still made to 19th century recipes, boiled in copper pans.

What is a quarter?

Before metric weights, sweets were sold by the ounce and the quarter pound. A quarter pound is about 113 g, a little more than the 100 g scoops we sell by. There is more on that in what a quarter of sweets means.

Why it matters

Most high street sweet shops of the 1800s are long gone, and the ones that survive rarely look the way they did. A shop that has sold sweets from the same town for close to two centuries is a living record of how the British have bought their sweets: loose, from a jar, weighed while you watch. You can read how that tradition grew in the history of the sweet shop.

If you cannot get to Yorkshire, our guides cover sweets it sells: pear drops, humbugs, rhubarb and custard and sherbet lemons.

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