Where did they all go?

And why?

When I was running around in shorts (in the 1970s) our local sweetshop, ‘The Chocolate Box’, was at the end of our road. It wasn’t a big road, so even ‘The Chocolate Box’ was not on the high street at such… but so many high streets did feature at least one sweet shop and now they all seem to have gone.

If They Are Not On The High Street, Where Are They Now?

Sadly an awful lot of the tiny sweetshops have disappeared completely -  both on and not on the High Street.  A lot of their staple sources of income are a lot less popular today than they were when I was young.  The name in the trade for these shops gives a clue to their sad demise… CTNs, or Confectioners, Tobacconists and Newsagents.

Not On The High Street Anymore, The Retro Sweetshop Has Moved Online

Confectioners
Sadly there isn’t much money to be made in penny chews, as the same suggests.  It’s very hard to sustain a business selling sweets alone… unless you sell an awful lot of them.  So the space where the confectionery used to be is frequently now taken up by more profitable products.  And the selection of sweets is reduced to a small selection of items which are higher profit and easy to sell (the staples of Mars Bars, Snickers, Twix etc – you know the standard fayre!)

Tobacconists
Back in the 1970s almost everyone seemed to smoke and so running a tobacconist, whether it was or was not on the high street, was a guaranteed source of income.  Plus when people came into your shop to buy cigarettes or tobacco (when was the last time you saw someone smoking a pipe?  or taking snuff?) they were more than likely to buy other things at the same time.  Nowadays smoking is becoming less and less common and so this source of income is much reduced.

Newsagents
In the 1970s no-one could have possibly imagined the effect that the internet would have on day to day life.  The sales of newspapers have been dramatically affected by the rise of the Web – far fewer people buy a daily paper than they did in the past, and fewer still have one delivered every day (like we used to, and so did pretty well everyone else!)

And as children we used to buy a comic every week too (I read Whizzer and Chips and my sister bought Twinkle… which I always thought was very unfair because it meant that she could read my comic when I’d finished with it, but I had no interest at all in her Twinkle.  I think that was probably one the factors that hastened my switch to reading Shoot!  My sister, Jane, was as interested in football as I was in girly fairy stories (or whatever stories Twinkle contained… probably lots about little girls with ponies I’d guess!)

Add to these factors the rise and rise of the supermarkets – not on the High Street but frequently on retail parks, dragging away custom from both the small corner shops and the High Street itself – and it is easy to see why small sweetshops have suffered so much over the years.

But many of the best sweets have survived even if the sweetshops have not, on the High Street or otherwise.

Not On The High Street, But Online

The internet undoubtedly contributed to the demise of the CTNs.  But it has also brought the full range of retro sweets to a wider audience, both geographically and age-wise.  No longer do you have to try to find a local sweetshop that is open, whether that be on or not on the High Street.  Now retro sweet shops are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and they stock far more sweets than you could ever cram into an old-fashioned sweetshop.  We have around 650 different sweets for you to choose from – sweets from all around the country, so it doesn’t matter where you live… in the UK or anywhere around the World even… you can choose Black Bullets from the North East of England, Kendal Mint Cake from the North West, a whole host of delicious Scottish sweets… Geography is no longer an issue – not on the High Street but on the information superhighway that is the World Wide Web!

So of course it’s sad that proper old fashioned sweetshops are fewer and farther between.

But every cloud has a silver lining and in many ways online sweetshops offer many advantages over their traditional counterparts, and because they are not on the High Street you don’t have to traipse through town to enjoy your favourites -  you can have your sweet and eat it!.

• You can can grab the first tacky gift that appears (at least that means that the tricky task is solved… ish!)
• or you can choose one whose permanence will be far longer than the time it takes to tear off the wrapping paper. Imagine it was your 40th birthday.

What would you like to receive?

OK, but supposing your mates couldn’t stretch to a Porsche 911 and a spacewalk – what would you accept instead?

The best 40th birthday gift isn’t the most expensive or the flashiest.  It’s the one that shows you’ve gone to the bother of considering what the recipient might actually like.  That’s right – the thought really does count, so better make it a good one.

Thankfully, we’ve done the thinking for you, and have assembled our own shortlist of 40th birthday ideas.  The best part is that you can still claim the credit for conceiving of such a charming gift – we promise we won’t tell.

40th Birthday Ideas – Our Top Tips

A Decade in a Box

It doesn’t take a calculus degree to deduce that if you’re verging on 40, you were a child of the 70s.

The 70s may have been typified by rubbish hair and glam rock, but it wasn’t all bad – just think about the sweets: Fizzy Cola Bottles, Love Hearts, Golf Ball Bubble Gum and Fruit Salads.

Merely picturing such a cornucopia of candy is enough to make you nostalgic for the 70s – even if you weren’t old enough to have lived through them.

Our 1970s Decade Box, filled to overflowing with authentic sweets from that era, is enough to have any 40-year-old reverting to a childlike state, complete with short trousers and skinned knees.  The sweets may be from the 70s incidentally, but they haven’t been sitting in a box for 40 years – each one has been freshly made, so your birthday pal can get stuck into them.

Alternatively, they may wish to preserve the sweets within their charming 1970s Decade Box for another 40 years before flogging the lot on eBay.  Either way, at least your gift won’t have been in vain.

Pamper them with a Hamper

Most 40th birthday hampers contain such sensible grown-up gifts as bath salts and shower gel.  Not ours.  Our hampers are packed to the gunnels with Strawberry Bootlaces,  Tootie Frooties, Fizzers and Drumsticks.  They’re not so good for bathing with, but they taste amazing and make for a great 40th birthday gift.

Best of all, every Retro Sweet Hamper contains an authentic 1970s or 80s comic!  Which beloved childhood role models will feature in yours – Dennis the Menace? Beryl the Peril?  And more to the point, will you be able to resist opening the hamper to have a peek prior to gift-wrapping it?

A Million 40th Birthday Ideas

Alternatively, you may prefer to purchase an entire jar of Raspberry Millions.

Remember those teeny-tiny sweets you used to spend all your lunch money on, much to your mum’s consternation?

Back then, you could only afford a handful, but now you can treat your birthday mate to a jar full of the chewy little devils.  All that’s left to do is inscribe a witty aside about purchasing one million for every year they’ve been on the planet and you’re sorted!

Who’d have thought that hunting for 40th birthday ideas could be such a sweet pleasure?

Why do we go all misty eyed when we start listing the old-fashioned sweets from our childhood… and find that the list goes on and on as other favourites pop into our mind?

Pick Of The LollyPops! 10 Of Our Retro Sweets Best Sellers.

Remember these?:

Chocolate Coins	Barratts Shrimps	Mini Love Hearts	Fizzy Cola Bottles	Drumsticks – Original (Raspberry and Milk)
Foam Mushrooms	Sweet Tobacco	Black Jacks	Pint Pots	Milk Gums

Well here’s why we think that retro sweets hold such a special place in our hearts.

You Remember Lots Of Retro Sweets From Your Childhood

… but we thought they’d stopped making them. Probably pretty well everyone remembers sherbet fountains, aniseed balls and space dust – but we bet you haven’t seen any of them in any shops for years and years. So surely, you think, they must have stopped making them. Well think again, because they haven’t (as you will see from our massive selection at A Quarter Of…)

You Find Other Retro Sweets That You’d Completely Forgotten About.

These are the real retro sweets gems! There will be other sweets that you’ll see as you browse around A Quarter Of… that you had forgotten all about. Whether it’s Gold Nuggets (the gold pieces of bubblegum in a little cloth bag), kali or Spanish Gold – the old-fashioned sweets that bring the most nostalgic memories are often the ones that had slipped your mind completely!

The old-fashioned sweetshop where we used to buy our retro sweets. 
There seemed to be a little sweetshop on every street corner and in every parade of shops. Often they were very small and sold nothing apart from newspapers (and comics), cigarettes and tobacco, and lots and lots of sweets. Oh and they had one of those Walls (or Lions Made) ice lolly freezers for hot summer days too. Our local sweetshop had a stand in the corner with lots of jokes on… it was brilliant!

Your first taste of spending money. 
You used to be spoiled for choice; it was so difficult to choose which retro sweets to spend your pocket money on. But the lovely lady behind the counter (did every sweetshop have a litle old lady, with her hair in a bun, serveing in it?) never rushed you; I think that she knew that the choosing process was one of the joys of buying traditional sweets. I used to stand there looking in wonder at all of the options – deciding what would go into my little white paper bag. And then, just as I was about to commit, different retro sweets would catch my eye and I’d change my mind again. It’s great being a child in a retro sweetshop – but it makes deciding so very difficult!

The memories they bring back. 

Just hearing the name of an old favourite like Anglo Bubbly Bubblegum brings memories flooding back… whether it was the long hot summer of 1976, playing football in the park with jumpers for goalposts, the Bay City Rollers on the radio and all the most fashionable kids copying their Shangalang wearing tartan to look really groovy! (I didn’t say it was ALL good!).

So if that’s what just hearing the names of your favourite retro sweets does, just think what memories are brought back by seeing your favourite childhood sweets again.

Or, best of all, actually tasting them!

Prepare for a delicious trip down memory lane… and enjoy the best retro sweets ever!  

It’s one of the questions we have been asked over and over since we had the idea for A Quarter Of … back in 2001.

And why don’t you see traditional, old-fashioned sweets in retro sweetshops anymore?

Retro Sweetshops - One Of My Favourite Childhood Memories

The Sad Demise of the Retro Sweetshops on the Corner

We modeled A Quarter Of… on a little sweetshop called “The Chocolate Box” at the end of our road when I was young  -it was my favourite of all of the retro sweetshops that I can rememebr. Sadly, like most other retro sweetshops,  it has long since disappeared.

It used to be rammed full of old-fashioned sweets, newspapers and comics… and it sold jokes too.

Nowadays little retro sweetshops like that are getting rarer… instead of space for a wide range of retro sweets, little shops like that have become mini-supermarkets – selling milk and cat food and washing powder.

Retro Sweetshops Became Mini Supermarkets

So the space for confectionery is massively reduced and they tend to stick to the big sellers, the “safe” sweets like Mars Bars, Cadbury Dairy Milk etc. There’s just no space for retro classics like gobstoppers or sugar mice. It’s so sad.

Are Our Retro Sweets Left Over Stock from the 1970′s?

And if so, are they still edible?

We have genuinely been asked this on a number of occasions! I suppose that people think that, because they haven’t seen many of our classic traditional sweets for so long that they aren’t made anymore.

The good news is that the answer is a resounding “No! Our retro sweets might remind you of the 1970s but they are all freshly made”

So Where Do We Get Our Traditional, Old Favourite Sweets From?

When we started A Quarter Of… we had about 60 different sweets. We thought we might get up to about 200 sweet classics… How wrong we were! We are now up to just over 700! We hunt long and hard to find new suppliers so that we can stock every retro favourite that is still being made. And we have some of the sweets made specially for us.

So the little retro sweetshops might have gone, but their memory… and all of the fun… lives on at www.AQuarterof.co.uk

Press Information!

We’re always over the moon to hear from the press.  Here’s what we can do for you:

• If you’re doing a shoot, and need some sweets to brighten things up, we’re always delighted to oblige in exchange for a credit.

• If you’d like to feature one of our products, and need us to send a sample to you, we can get it delivered to you next day (just as long as we hear from you before 3pm).

• If you’d like to do a story on how A Quarter Of started, or any other story relating to A Quarter Of, we can send you copy.

• If you’d like information about a defunct sweet that is no longer produced (like Aztec Bars, Texan Bars or Spangles), we can help!  We have a section called ‘Whatever Happened To…’ which is a forum for people to reminisce about hundreds of sweets and chocolate.  We have gathered a lot of information over the years…

• If you need any high resolution images, just email our head of PR John and he will sort it for you.

Make Money with our Affiliate Programme!

Do you have a website?  Do you like what we do?  How do you fancy promoting a superb online Sweetshop?

Would you like to make some money by spreading the word about A Quarter Of…?

If you would, then join our successful Affiliate Scheme!  We pay up to 9% commission on sales of our range of fabulous gifts and the best, most fun sweets ever made!

It really couldn’t be simpler…

1. Sign up for FREE
2. Put an A Quarter Of… link on your site (don’t worry… we have created everything for you… and there is a choice of links to use).
3. Spread the word.
4. Get paid for every single sale that you generate!

Just click on the Affiliate Window link below, fill out a simple application form (it takes about 2 mins! – and includes important info like how you’d like to be paid!!!),  and then you’ll receive an e-mail from Affiliate Window giving you all the necessary information to get started.

Affiliate Window do all of the important, behind the scenes stuff… like paying you!!!

Then just put banners and text links on your web site, spread the word… and start earning and helping us at the same time!

You will be amazed how easy it is!!

So sign up today and remember…

1. It’s FREE to join
2. You can earn money from your site easily and quickly
3. You help to spread the word about A Quarter Of… and make money at the same time!
4. You add value to your site by telling people about us
5. A Quarter Of…pays on each confirmed, shipped sale – we validate all commissions on a daily basis
6. Commission levels are fantastic
7. Great conversion rates
8. High average order values
9. A Quarter Of is consistently one of AWin’s star performers
10. Great gift range – high order values, and great performance during key seasonal dates

To join our Affiliate Programme through Affiliate Window, click here

So get promoting and watch the ££££s roll in!

If you have any questions about our Affiliate Programme, simply email us at: affiliates@aquarterof.com

We trundled off down memory lane, remembering all the sweets that we used to buy from the little sweetshop at the end of our road (on the way to school – most convenient!!). It was called “The Chocolate Box”.

We were certain that the idea would not get any further because they couldn’t possibly still make the sweets that we remembered with such fond memories… I mean if they did still make them, surely we would have seen them around… and we hadn’t… We discovered that in most cases they did (and do) still make them!!

Gobstoppers, Kola Kubes and Milk Teeth?

And so the idea was born. And the reactions of friends and family when we told them of the idea and their eyes glazed over as they started listing all the sweets that we just had to have in the shop (the list often went on and on) made us think that it would be a website that people would like…

Then we needed a look for the site… and that’s where the comic that we used to read when we were young came in – Whizzer and Chips (now sadly defunct) – we wanted an online sweetshop that looked like the comic.

And that’s where we struck gold because we found a superstar cartoonist (one of the original Whizzer and Chips cartoonists no less!) to draw the cartoons for A Quarter Of – to give it the perfect feel. His name is Colin Whittock and he is an absolute marvel. One of the best bits of working at A Quarter Of, apart from the sweet tasting of course (which we do over and over), is when Colin sends us new drawings – they are just fab and always bring a smile… You can see more of Colin’s gems at his web site www.colinwhittock.co.uk/.

The final element that inspired A Quarter Of was a book I loved when I was young – it was (and is) fab! You can read more about it by following this link - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

A Quarter Of has evolved in many different ways, but one project we’re really proud of is a range of our own sweets, The Best You’ve Ever Tasted range.  We took the most traditional boiled sweets we could remember, and we refined the recipes to make them taste amazing – so people could almost re-experience the amazing sensation of tasting a lovely sweet for the first time.  You see, we feel really passionate about the tradition of British sweets.  Take Rhubarb & Custards – the sweet is divided into two distinct flavours: the tart, extremely fruity rhubarb, and the deliciously creamy custard.  They’re lovely!

We supply traditional retro sweets to loyal customers throughout the UK, and to expats all over the world hankering after a taste of home and happy childhoods!

‘My Auntie Marjorie had her kitchen redone in the early sixties, mainly in orange. It even had orange spotty seats. I remember her telling us she thought it was really great, “because it looks just like a snack bar”’

‘Hardly any rental properties in the sixties had fridges. In summer you kept your milk in a pan of water on a shady windowsill.’

‘Friends moved down to London in the late sixties and got a flat in Holland Park. They painted all the walls dark purple, which I thought was so cool. You couldn’t see a thing, but it was cool.’

‘When I left home to go to university in 1966, I bought myself a portable record player for about £20 and a fake-fur, purple-backed cushion. I thought they were the height of chic. I bought myself a Joan Baez record, a Dylan and a Beatles, and I was all set.’

‘We all had to have collages on our walls, pictures made of images torn or cut from magazines. I had one featuring the gorgeous model Veruschka, and lots of photos from Honey.’

Extracted, with permission, from The 50s & 60s: The Best of Times – Growing up and being young in Britain by Alison Pressley, publishedby Michael O’Mara Books Limited.

Copyright © Alison Pressley 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003; compilation copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 1999, 200, 2002, 2003. All rights reserved.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I first saw my sister cooking real spaghetti in 1964: I was astonished when I saw her feeding these long, stiff strands of pasta into a pan of boiling water, because I’d only ever seen or tasted tinned spaghetti before that.’

‘People were just starting to go out to eat. I remember the Berni Inn in Worcester, where we’d go on Friday nights to have chicken in a basket and a glass of red wine, followed by an Irish coffee. Great fun.’

Extracted, with permission, from The 50s & 60s: The Best of Times – Growing up and being young in Britain by Alison Pressley, publishedby Michael O’Mara Books Limited.
Copyright © Alison Pressley 1999, 200, 2002, 2003; compilation copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 1999, 200, 2002, 2003. All rights reserved.

1960s School Photo

‘I came from a village where more or less everyone went to the local church school from age five to fourteen then left. But my mother decided that I would go to a grammar school, so when the sixties began I found myself among this new lot of people, doing unheard-of things like learning Latin.’

‘When I was twelve, I made the decision that I would go into the commercial stream at school rather than the academic. After a year, I realized that this was utterly wrong, so I asked if I could change. And I was told no, of course you can’t.’

‘Letter from a headmaster to parents, dated 1 September 1965:
“Dear Parents
In my opinion, there has been a decline over the past year in the attention members of the school give to their personal appearance. It started with this matter of hair. A few senior boys began adopting long, girlish hairstyles associated with some pop singers. This seemed harmless enough, and I expected them to grow out of it. But recently younger boys, falling under their spell, have copied them, and school as a whole has an increasingly unkempt look. Quite frankly, I am tired of seeing hair creeping over coat collars and over ears, down the face, and in a few extreme cases falling over the eyes, interfering with games and physical activity. With it goes a disregard for clothes and shoes, and at times a sullen look, taken, I imagine, from the popular image of what modern young people should look like…If your son is one of the shaggy minority, or one of those likely to copy those who are, I ask that you send him back at the beginning of next term with his hair cut reasonably short, and, with your encouragement, to take more pride in his appearance”’

Extracted, with permission, from The 50s & 60s: The Best of Times – Growing up and being young in Britain by Alison Pressley, publishedby Michael O’Mara Books Limited.

Copyright © Alison Pressley 1999, 200, 2002, 2003; compilation copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003. All rights reserved.