Andrew James / 11 July 2025 / Categories: City, Services, Food & Drink, Product and Brands, Food

The Oldest Sweet Shop In The World Pately Bridge North Yorkshire

A Yorkshire man through and through happy to shop small and local online in 2025

Don’t you just love a bag of old fashioned sweets. I am young enough (old enough really) to remember black jacks, fruit salads and all the other penny chews we used to pick up after school at the newsagent before the walk home.

When I quit drinking alcohol I found a sweet tooth return I wasn’t really aware I had and I’ve never really been one for cakes or desserts and I was in training, didn’t want anything too heavy so found myself going back in time to the sweets I enjoyed as kid except the only ones I could find on the shelves today were a version of Opal Fruits, now renamed starburst which for me didn’t quite taste the same as I had remembered.

I went in search of a bit of nostalgia and discovered online the oldest sweet shop in the world, est 1827 what a great name for a sweet shop was my first thought and started browsing the offering. Whatever you are looking for sherbet lemons, pear drops, rhubarb and custards you’ll find them here.

They are based in Pateley Bridge an area I know well being from Yorkshire and the offering is all the old sweets I remembered enjoying as a kid in paper bags weighed out in the shop.

They don’t come like that anymore, each portion sealed in cellophane bags but the sweets taste exactly the same.

Whatever you are looking for, Sherbet fountains, midget gems, strawberry and lemon bonbons, they even have the plain white toffee ones, cola bottles, treacle, liquorice, banana toffees, foxes glacier mints and fruits, liquorice shoe laces, you name it the oldest sweet shop in the world can provide it, all the tastes and flavours of our youth, drilled down into a few Haribo sours or Bassett wine gum bags now available in the supermarket. The days of the boiled sweet, a mint imperial or Everton mint has been replaced with poor quality chocolate in less than shiny wrappers that for me tastes chalky and fake, have you tried a Kit Kat lately, don’t get me started.

Any way the online service at the Oldest sweet shop in the world has been great. I try not to go too mad keeping my order around £30 - £35. I get about 8 pretty large bags for this averaging £4 a bag. Probably the weight in each bag 6-8 ounces so they do last me a while, a couple of months at least.

Everything has been excellent, the quality of the sweets good except the Pontefract cakes, liquorice discs many may never have even heard of but for folk from Yorkshire they are a make or break sweet. I grew up eating them so fair to say one of my absolute favourites. They weren’t bad, nothing wrong with them just not the texture or flavour I was expecting.

That said everything else I’ve had has been near perfect. I imagine the shop to be a Hansel and gretal type haven in the heart of the Yorkshire dales and the next time I am in that neck of the woods I’ll definitely be popping in to say hello.

In the meantime better get online and order some more sweets. The bag of black jacks in the photo are the last of my latest box and as you can see they are half eaten and won’t last much longer.