Hinchliffe’s, Huddersfield: Britain’s oldest farm shop in Yorkshire run by four family generations is ‘still standing’ despite challenges

Hinchliffe’s in Huddersfield was founded by a butcher called Allen Hinchliffe in 1929, who died quite early and left four children and a widow.

His eldest son, Charles, who was 16 years old at the time, took over the business and expanded it into a few butcher shops, a travellers shop, a small factory and began rearing chickens.

To take care of the chickens, he decided to buy a piece of land and ended up with his own herd of cattle, which he used to supply the butchery and sold the ingredients.

The current partner at Hinchliffe’s, Simon Hirst, 53, is the grandson of Charles.

“It was my grandfather who really changed everything,” he said.

“He didn’t go to war at 16, he missed it because he was part of the effort for providing food. He was growing tomatoes and all sorts as a young man.

“Charles was driven to take it from one butcher shop to a few. When you go back so far, there’s an arc to everything. He got his mum and three brothers and sisters to feed as well.

“He was someone who wanted to try all of these different things. He was one of the first to diversify.

“We are the fourth generation, my parents are still involved on a small scale.”

Charles also started selling potatoes and other vegetables from the farm and converted one of the sheds into a farm shop which ran smoothly until 2010 when a fire broke out and destroyed the newly built restaurant attached to the farm shop.

The building was rebuilt and up and running in 2019.

“We used to rear up to a million chickens a year for the egg industry and we gradually wound that down now,” Mr Hirst said.

“It’s become a lot harder to compete with the big boys now. We rear about 80,000 now. We sell those to other people as well like farms, garden centres and people around the country who sell to people.

Explore Yorkshire’s history with us - get the YP’s heritage newsletter

“We’re really focusing now on the shop and restaurant attached called The Rusty Bull. We still have our own herd and cattle. We move with the times to try and make a living.

“We’ve been through all the knocks and we’re still standing and going strong. We won competitions for our products as well [including] Great Taste Awards for meats, pies, cakes, so we can hold our own.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr Hirst said that they had to close the restaurant which was turned it into a warehouse where they delivered food to homes. Their sales trebled overnight as people were desperate due to the food shortages.

“Nobody could go anywhere and everybody was relying on the food shop,” he said.

“We ended up working incredibly hard through the Covid period; none of our staff had any time off. We had to furlough the restaurant staff but as few as possible.

“I spent most of the time putting the vegetables out which I hadn’t done since I was a kid. Everything stopped, we were never in the office. It was quite nice in a way, we literally got to work and did the basics.

“A lot of people were really appreciative during Covid because we were a bit of a lifeline for them.

“Then things changed drastically, just when we thought things would get back to normal, we had the Ukraine invasion and the cost of living crisis.

“This was a real shock for us because we went from sales going up to sales dropping. That was a real worry for a while.

Throughout all the hurdles, they continue to grow the business until today.

Mr Hirst shared their secret to keeping the business going.

“It’s never giving up,” he said.

“We’ve been through all these things; we’ve had the fire, we’ve had legal battles as well with competitors, you just have to get on with it and never give up.

“There’s an old saying: ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’, where a third generation ends up losing the family success but we’ve managed to avoid that. We’re the fourth generation and going strong.

“One thing about us is that people always need to eat. There’s something my granddad said that stuck with me: ‘there’s always a market for quality’.

“So with all these price rises, we’ve had to build in price rises in the business because of labour costs.

“We’ve had ingredient prices going up like beef, chocolate, cream, eggs, flour, a lot of the basic things. One thing we’ve always said is that we’re never going to skimp on quality.

“We’ve never gone to find a cheaper ingredient. Everything here is handmade as well, so you have to charge a bit of a premium on that.”

They have people from all over the region and further afield visiting the farm shop, including celebrities.

“We’ve got a loyalty scheme which is good, we put people’s basic data that we’re allowed to keep,” he said.

“You see postcodes; people come from the Halifax area, Wakefield, Bradford, we’re on the border with Manchester here so we get people coming from there.

“We get a few famous people in, foreigners in, it’s quite a mixed bag. Over the years we’ve had premier league footballers, actors and some of the [famous visitors] are quite local.”

There are many locals who visit the shop and share their stories and connections with its history.

“I was talking to a lady who remembers the original shop before I was born and it would be my great-grandma,” Mr Hirst said.

“She used to sit on the end of the counter and used to watch everything, the money and the widow would be watching everybody in the shop.

“Apparently she was quite a fierce lady as well, quite a lady to be reckoned with. She was trying to describe her and I said, that was probably my great-grandma watching what was going on.

“We’ve got people who used to come here as children and now they’re at university. I remember them as I was at the restaurant 24 to 25 years ago.

“I remember watching them coming in as babies and they’ve now got kids of their own, some of them or they’re at university.

“People love to come in and have a friendly chat with the staff, it’s a really friendly place.”