A Tyneside
RISE AND FALL OF A FAMOUS BAKERY AND CAFE CHAIN
OUR wonderful main photograph from nearly 65 years ago takes us into the heart of bustling Newcastle city centre.
It was 1955, the year rock’n’roll arrived, Sir Anthony Eden was elected Prime Minister, and Newcastle United won their last major domestic trophy, the FA Cup.
Eight years after the end of World War II, with Britain getting back on its feet and rationing consigned to history, we see Grainger Street busy with shoppers.
Readers who recall the street in that era might recall stopping off for lunch, upstairs at Carrick’s Restaurant.
Here in the North East, the name was omnipresent on our High Streets.
In that bygone era of table linen and washroom roller towels, Carrick’s had no fewer than 12 shops and cafes (the latter complete with waitress service) in Newcastle city centre alone.
If you wanted to tuck into some Carrick’s grub in the Toon, there were shops and cafes in the likes of Market Street, Blackett Street, Collingwood Street, Northumberland Street, Percy Street, as well as this one on Grainger Street.
By the end of the 1960s, the bakery chain had more than 100 cafes and shops between Middlesbrough in the south and Alnwick in the North.
Carrick’s headquarters and main bakery in Cowgate was an important city employer.
The company, however, had its origins in Low Row, Cumberland, in the last quarter of the 19th century when a certain Thomas Carrick became a major producer of milk, cheese and butter.
The business developed in the early decades of the 20th century before expanding to the North East where shops and small bakeries were opened
in towns and villages, and the company’s main bakery at Cowgate began operating in 1950.
From the 1940s onwards, having lunch at a Carrick’s cafe was a thoroughly civilised affair with waitresses delivering hot meals to solid wooden tables laden with white linen table cloths and good quality cutlery.
Later, the Carrick’s Light Bite era was marked by formicatopped tables, paper napkins and hand driers.
However, as the 1970s dawned, the brand had major competition in the shape of another North East baker, Greggs of Gosforth, which had been growing and innovating since the late 1930s. Waitress-service cafes were finding themselves outmoded as fast food became the norm.
By 1984, there were around just 60 Carrick’s outlets left in the North East, and these were taken over by Allied Bakeries, gradually becoming part of the Bakers Oven brand. Ten years later and Bakers Oven itself was taken over by the ever-expanding Greggs.
In September 2004, the Chronicle reported on the closure of the Carricks’ bakery in Ponteland Road, Cowgate, which Greggs had bought a decade earlier.
It was the end of a Tyneside era.
Waitress-service cafes were finding themselves outmoded as fast food became the norm