the toffee shop
33 Common Green,
Strathaven, Ayrshire
01357 521158
Visitors to Strathaven cock their
heads like Bisto kids and follow the warm current of chocolatey air to the pink shop on the common. For 100 years the Gilmour family has serviced the sweet-toothed needs of this chocolate-box village with their homemade treats. In 1904, Samuel Gilmour, an apprentice with R & J Templeton grocer, opened a shop with his wife, who had a special talent for making sweets. A century later, his grandson Ian runs the business.
The back wall is a rainbow of jars crammed with old-style sweeties, 130 in all, including pineapple chunks, cola cubes, sweet peanuts, raspberry ruffles and Cadbury's eclairs. What the shop lacks in space it makes up for in variety. A compact cabinet stocks four flavours of Nardini's ice cream, including mint and toffee crunch.
Inside glass cabinets sit trays of loose chocolates which can be made up into gift boxes. Choose from Belgian chocolate flavours such as Baileys and champagne truffles, rum and raisin creams and passion-fruit hearts. Butter fudge, tablet and chocolate-covered tablet are handmade on the premises. Old favourites like coconut ice, nougat, macaroon bars and sherbet dips lurk between the chocolates.
At its height in the 1950s the shop employed 15 and had a factory across the road which shipped the famous Strathaven toffee (actually tablet) around the world. Ian took over from his 70-year-old father in 1979 when he was made redundant from his personnel job in London.
''We made the decision quite quickly to take on the shop. I think Ian wanted to be in control of his own destiny,'' explains his wife Wendy. They didn't have time to ponder their decision: the day they arrived, the delivery driver had a heart attack and Wendy found herself, with two young children on the passenger seat, taking his place. Nowadays she helps part-time in the shop and makes a couple of batches of chocolate a week. ''Making the chocolates is a real labour of love, but as long as we're not losing money we'll keep it on.''
While not the great tablet empire it was, the shop is a trove of much-loved, nearly forgotten sweets. Just follow your nose.
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