I love slow cooking. Nothing beats a meat stew cooked slowly in a cast iron pot and in winter I have no problem, I use the solid fuel stove I have in the front room, it's saves a fortune on leccy as well! The stove is cold now for the summer so I decided to spend some of the Burial Fund on a slow cooker. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of shopping at local shops and so I went and had a furtle and found just what I wanted in Town Square. Just for curiosity I looked for the same cooker online and found that it was cheaper in Barlick because there was no postage to pay. By the way, I'm delighted with it and it uses less juice than my electric stove. This got me to thinking about shopping in days gone by.
We've had a good range of retail shops in Barlick as far back as the 18th century but one of the things I realised when I was doing the interviews for the Lancashire Textile Project was that whilst they may have been perfectly adequate for the run of the mill shopping for plain foods, some of the better off people in the town had a different solution. They would order their groceries in bulk from places like Skipton and the local carrier, who made the trip there two or three times a week, brought the order and delivered it. This was I suppose, the older version of online shopping or the more common 'out of town' shopping at a large supermarket.
You might wonder what a picture of Manchester Road before road widening has to do with this week's subject. The white haired man in the foreground is 'Gara' Pickles. Like his father he was named Garibaldi and for many years the family earned their living as common carriers. Two or three times a week they went to Skipton carrying goods from the town and returning with anything that had to come here. This was of course all horse-drawn. People like Emma Clark who lived on Manchester Road would send a bulk order to one of the larger shops in Skipton and Gara would collect it and deliver to the house for a small fee. In the days before we had mains water Gara's father used to fill in by delivering water which he got from the spring at Wood End. Many people preferred it to the water from the town wells and enjoyed the convenience of it being brought to the door. I suppose this is a parallel to the people today who buy bottled water and in many cases spend more on that than milk!
What fascinates me about this is that over the years of change, many things stay the same. Even though we have a far better range of goods in the shops in Barlick and mains water, some people still cling, without realising it, to the old ways.
Manchester Road in 1965 before widening in Summer 1972.
