The Changing Fortunes of the High Street Bakery

In the early twentieth century, almost every British high street had at least one bakery, and many had several. Bread was the basis of most people's diet, and few homes had ovens reliable enough for regular baking. Bakers started work in the middle of the night so that fresh loaves would be ready when the shop opened, and in many towns bread was also delivered to the door each morning by a boy on a bicycle or by a horse-drawn cart. The local baker was a familiar figure who knew most of his customers by name.

Baking was hard, hot work. Most bakeries were family businesses, with the baker working at the ovens through the night while other members of the family served in the shop during the day. Children were often expected to help before and after school, and many bakers' sons went on to take over the business. The ovens themselves were usually heated by coal or wood, and the baker had to judge the temperature by experience, sometimes by throwing a handful of flour inside and watching how quickly it browned.

The decline of the independent bakery began in the years after the Second World War. Large industrial bakeries, using new methods that allowed dough to be mixed and risen in a fraction of the traditional time, could produce sliced, wrapped bread that stayed soft for days. It was cheaper than bread from a small baker and could be sold in the supermarkets that were starting to appear. At the same time, the long night hours made it hard for small bakers to find young people willing to learn the trade. By the 1990s, the great majority of bread in Britain was made in factories, and thousands of high street bakeries had closed.

Those that survived often did so by changing what they sold. Many turned to cakes, pastries and sandwiches, which offered a higher profit than bread, or opened cafés where customers could sit down. Others became part of regional chains, sharing a central bakery that supplied shops across a wide area. Some critics argued that this was not real baking, since the shops simply warmed products that had been made elsewhere, but it allowed the familiar bakery counter to remain on many high streets. Some shops also began to sell coffee to customers on their way to work.

In the last fifteen years, however, a new wave of small bakeries has opened, many of them run by people who left other careers to bake. Emma Castell, who opened a bakery in a former bank in the town of Eastmere, used to work as an accountant. She spent a year training with an experienced baker in another town before opening her own shop. 'I started baking at home as a hobby,' she says, 'and I became frustrated that I couldn't buy bread like mine anywhere nearby.' Her shop sells around three hundred loaves a day, most of them sourdough, which is made with a natural starter rather than commercial yeast and takes up to two days to produce.

Bakeries like Castell's have benefited from a growing interest in where food comes from and how it is made. Many customers are willing to pay considerably more for a loaf that has been made slowly by hand, using flour from local mills. Some new bakers also see themselves as part of the community in a broader sense: Castell runs bread-making classes on Sunday afternoons, and at the end of each day she gives unsold bread to a local charity rather than throwing it away.

The new bakeries face many of the same difficulties as their predecessors. The hours are still long, and rising costs of energy, flour and rent have forced some to close within a few years of opening. Castell acknowledges that her bread is too expensive for some families in the town, and she worries that the revival of craft baking could become a luxury enjoyed mainly by the better-off. To address this, she has started to sell a simple everyday loaf at a lower price. 'A bakery should be for everyone,' she says. 'That's what it was a hundred years ago, and that's what I'd like it to be again.'