Last week I wrote about the Ship Inn at Britford and our thanks go to Alan Clarke who has provided this week’s photograph showing the former inn being renovated.

As mentioned last week, the Ship Inn became a bakery and the building is still known as ‘The Old Bakery’.

If we go back 169 years we learn that Salisbury had 35 bakers, each using an oven to produce crusty bread in contrast to today’s pale, anaemic, mass-produced rectangular.

Butchers came next in number – about 27.

In those days a butcher was able to visit a farm and pick his meat before the animal was dead – hardly any meat was imported. Those who were in a position to afford game and poultry had a choice of four or five shops and there were only three fishmongers in Salisbury.

The number of grocers in the city in the 1850s was about 25. Although 25 seems a small number for grocery merchants of that time, there were 14 other establishments for selling cheese and bacon. Practically every farmhouse sent cheese to market.

Salisbury was still a compact city, and many houses built in the height of the wool trade had no gardens. Even so, there were fewer than 10 greengrocers in the city; possibly because the market was the main supplier.

Sweets and chocolates were regarded as a luxury by the working class, and a bag of sweets made an ideal reward or present for children. There were 12 confectioners in Salisbury.

There were countless public houses in the city in 1850. To supply these was a job necessitating no fewer than eight brewers.

This, then, is a small cross-section of the shops in Salisbury 169 years ago. Many of the buildings survived which is testament to the founders who scraped and saved to buy that little shop around the corner.