The Old Trafford Bakery is sandwiched tightly between the red brick terraces on Shrewsbury Street. Next to the door, there’s a poster for a soundclash coming up later this month, and customers are milling around outside, looking at the new takeaway menu, the sandwich board a comprehensive list of Jamaican standards - curry goat, ox tail, brown stew chicken.
Since the early 1960s, this small, but perfectly formed bakery has been supplying Caribbean hard dough bread, fruit buns and patties to the neighbourhood. And well beyond too. On Tuesday last week, ambulance driver Dale was waiting for the beef patties to come out of the oven, the smell of browning pastry thick in the air of the tiny shop.
“Sometimes I buy stuff and send it down south to my dad in the post, because he’s got no Caribbean bakery where he is. First class,” he says. “I’ll do that once or twice a year. But if the food wasn’t good, people wouldn’t come back.” So he’s a regular then?
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“He’s a regular to every takeaway there is,” his co-driver says, rolling her eyes. “I come here because the food tastes GOOD,” Dale laughs, heavily emphasising the ‘good’, and patting himself on the belly. “This is good living. I’m content, me. I’ll get a bun, some hard dough bread and a patty to eat on my way home.
“I’ll drive over from Longsight, make the journey because it’s worth it. It’s all about the authenticity of the food they’re making here.”
Behind the counter, Mrs Thompson - Joanne, but known better as ‘Mrs T’, or the more respectful ‘Mrs Thompson’ to everyone from staff to customers - can hear what he’s saying, and smiles. She’s owned the bakery since 2002, and her son Paul is in the back baking the patties, the pastry deep yellow and made with margarine - not so fashionable these days, but they wouldn’t taste the same otherwise. Yes, the beef ones are good. But the lamb are really something else, just spicy enough, the pastry short and melting.
Paul has worked here since he finished school, and unofficially before that too, earning pocket money by cleaning the pans as a boy. He became an apprentice to the former owner, Wilfred Reed, who started baking ‘in a small way’ at his home on Clifton Street, just around the corner, before founding the bakery where Dale and countless thousands over the years now get their patties, hard dough and fruit buns. Paul says it’s ‘still my passion’, but it’s hard work. He’s usually up at 3 or 4am, with his assistant baker Devon.
“My god, man, the hours you put in, it’s ridiculous,” he says. “People look at me like I’m crazy, but honestly I can’t wait to get up and do it again tomorrow morning, that’s what I’ve always been like.” The bakery is intrinsic not only to the neighbourhood, and to his family - his younger sister Anthea works here too, and his wife makes the takeout food in the small kitchen on the first floor - but there are also ley lines stretching back to Jamaica too. Mr Reed was from the same parish, St James, as the Thompson family, and his sister would later marry Joanne's brother.
So when, at 18, Joanne arrived in Manchester, moving into an attic room of one of the imposing, three-storey houses just a few doors down from the bakery, there was already a piece of home here.
It was 1964, and she remembers the cold vividly. “It was the middle of winter, February,” she laughs. “It was so cold! I couldn’t imagine how much ice there was, on the road and in the street. It was amazing to see. But once the summer came, you could almost forget about home. I was very lucky that I had people that I was coming to, and a room ready for me. Many weren’t as lucky as I was.”
She lived with her elder sister on Shrewsbury Street, and as many young women from the latter end of the Windrush did, she went into nursing to help fix the shortfall in the profession at the time. After passing her ‘enrolled nurse’ - EN - qualifications, she worked mostly at North Manchester General, the bulk of it night shifts and weekends, so that she could easier raise her four children and be at home during the day. She gave 36 years in all to the NHS.
When she retired, and her husband Howard passed away, she bought the bakery from Mr Reed, who was planning to see out his own retirement back in Jamaica. With it, she and Paul inherited the amazing machinery that still makes the hard dough and patties today. The dough mixer, German-made and still operating like clockwork some 90 years after manufacture, is the first thing you see as you walk in, and it’s genuinely huge, with a round lid like a giant globe.
The busiest times are Christmas and Easter, when the hours stretch out even longer than usual. The fruit buns in particular fly out at Easter time. “It’s a cultural thing,” Mrs Thompson says. “Where we come from, at Easter time we have a lot of bun and cheese. Fried fish and what have you.”
The hard dough loaf is pretty unique as far as bread goes. Dense like a bagel, and heavy, it sticks to your ribs. Paul’s is a sourdough style, picked up from the way Mr Reed taught him, proved overnight at least 12 hours, and pricked on top with a fork. The buns, rich, spiced and full of fruit, are glazed on top and excellent slathered in butter but best, as Mrs Thompson says, with a piece of cheese. Then there are the sweet banana and ginger cakes, stacked high on the shelves. It's a treasure trove.
Things are difficult now, of course, as they are for anyone baking for a living. “Because of this war in Ukraine, flour has gone up, not by 50 or 60 pence, but £1.80, £2 per bag, each time,” Mrs T laments. Those £2 increases have already happened a couple of times this year. The buns and the loaves are more expensive now, but they’re not passing on the full costs to customers just yet. “We absorb it,” she adds. “This year we’ve put 10p or 20p on buns, and 10p on bread. We wonder how we’re going to cope. But we’ll see.”
Now with the take-out menu, they hope that this will give the business a lift too, and it truly should. Once the storm is weathered, she hopes that the bakery will stay in the family, when she decides to retire properly. “That’s why it was bought,” she says. “As a family business. But people come in and they say to us, ‘please don’t go from here, please don’t go from here!’” You can’t blame them.
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