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The corner sweet shop was near Silver Street School and sold triangular bags of broken wafer biscuits with a marshmallow fish on top.
Then there was another corner sweet shop which always had a large tray of home-made toffee on the counter. The shopkeeper would break it up with a small hammer and what looked like a pair of scissors.
Reconstruction of a Victorian / Edwardian sweet shop in Milestones in Basingstoke. Being a reconstruction, some items may come from the later 1900s and other items that one might expect seem to be missing, for example scales to weigh out the sweets.
Click the photograph for a more detailed one of the jars, showing their labels. (It opens in a new window.)
Early 1900s-style sweet display with scales for weighing out the sweets. Photographed in the Cambridge and County Folk Museum.
Sweet shops sold all kinds of children’s sweets - bull’s eyes, pear drops, humbugs, liquorice, etc. The commercially produced sweets came in large, well labelled jars and were weighed out to customer's requirements. We children normally bought an ounce at a time and occasionally, if we could afford it, 2 ounces. We never bought chocolate. It wasn't around much if at all.
In the 1950s my father suddenly announced that he hadn't seen tiger nuts for ages and as he had liked them so much as a boy, he was going to try to track some down. When he did he came back and told us all how horrible they were and how he couldn't imagine how he had ever liked them. Pat Cryer
The sweet shop also sold tiger nuts. We children particularly liked the tiger nuts because they were so sweet, but they often had insects and grit in them. Surprisingly we never minded the insects at the time, but the grit could give teeth a nasty jar.
If you have an old photo which illustrates any aspect of an Edwardian or Victorian sweet shop, I should be pleased to hear from you. Pat Cryer
These childhood recollections are sweet shops in a working class area of north London around the time of the 1911 census.