It’s 4am on Middleton Road, and the front of the Heaton Park Shul is slowly revealing itself, though the sun is still at least an hour away. Opposite, there’s light and the sound of clattering trays coming from behind the plastic curtains at Manchester’s oldest kosher bakery.
While most of us sleep, or some of us are stumbling back from the pub, this lot have been up for a couple of hours already, their shifts starting around two every morning. They’re used to it of course. Few more so than Steve Kelly, head baker at State Fayre, who’s worked here for 42 years.
He’s among the long-serving bakers who worked for the Rosenfield family, the previous owners of the bakery, who made State Fayre’s name through generations and more than a hundred years of kosher baking - since opening in 1905 - flooding North Manchester and well beyond its huge Jewish community with bagels, challah and kichels, the sweet, sugar-coated biscuits traditionally served in synagogue after the shabbat service on a Saturday. Not to mention cheesecakes, muffins, savouries, barm cakes, anything you could imagine.
