In the heart of Lincoln, the beloved sweet business Sharpe’s Sweets, has been spreading joy as a family for almost 60 years.
Surviving market closures, personal challenges and the fast-changing world of business they became an important traditional part of both the local community and the global tourist scene.
Graham Sharpe, owner of Sharpe’s Sweets in the Cornhill Quarter, said: “There’s a lot more to it than you think, like I told somebody once, it not my living, it’s my life. I haven’t been to work for 50 years.”
In 1969, he started with a trestle in an outside market, moving from town-to-town, offering a variety of confectionaries. But as times changed, so did the landscape of retail in Lincoln. The business moved into the Co-Op market which then closed in 2015, which led to the opening of the store in the Cornhill quarter.
The 86-year-old said: “My first market was in Newark on a Saturday, and I took £34 in an afternoon at half a crown a pound. Now half a crown is eight in a pound, and I took £34, so I served 250 people then, off of a trestle on a Saturday afternoon and I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my days.”
The family-run business has had to develop to change in the past five decades, as times changed, so did rules on trade, locations and money. When the market closed in 2015, Graham made the decision to open the store to start his new journey and continue to share the joy of a traditional confectionary business in Lincoln.
Graham, who will be celebrating 56 years of business this year, said: “The market closed, we had no alternative but to take the shop. We opened in 2015. We had some massive changes to get used to like the pick a mix changing”.
“It was a big change; it was a hairdresser before, so a lot of development had to be done. It was a bit treacherous. They gave me two weeks free rent to open it, it took me three days to open it. Came in on Sunday and we were open on the Wednesday.”
Graham also spoke about how the main challenge he faced in his five decades of experience as a business owner was decimalisation.
He said: “It went from pennies to pence, so you had 240 pennies in a pound, now you’ve got 100, which is simpler, decimalisation is simpler. Then it decimalised on weights, so a quarter is now 100g.
“Decimalisation was the biggest thing because we sold so many products.”
Local tourists love an independent sweet shop in Lincoln, but the shop sees customers from all over the globe.
Graham has a review book full of signatures and comments from customers who have visited the shop, he said: “We have people that come in from other parts of the world and we ask them to fill this book in. There are people coming from Dubai, Spain, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Taiwan, Brazil, Italy, Norway, Ireland, USA.
“See it’s not just a little sweet shop, it’s a novelty, because the world doesn’t have many traditional sweet shops.
“We’re serving the world; that’s why it says world famous outside. That’s why I generated the book.”
