The Last Loaf

Hartley's Bakery was opened in 1890 by a young baker called Thomas Hartley, in a stone building at the bottom of the main street in Kettlesby, a small village in the Yorkshire Dales. Since then, it has been run by five generations of the same family. The ovens have been replaced three times and the shop window has been broken twice, once by a runaway cow, but the bread has been made in more or less the same way for more than a hundred and thirty years.

The current owner, Margaret Hartley, is seventy-one. She has been getting up at four o'clock every morning since she was sixteen. So when she announced in March that she was going to retire, nobody in Kettlesby was really surprised. What shocked them was the second part of the announcement. Margaret did not own the building; it had been rented from the same landlord for decades. And the landlord had decided that it would be sold.

The news spread quickly. By lunchtime, it was being discussed in the post office, the pub and the queue outside the school gates. According to a rumor, the building was going to be bought by a property company from Leeds and turned into holiday flats. Several villagers had seen men with measuring tapes outside the shop the week before. "If that bakery is closed," said the vicar at the parish meeting that evening, "this village will lose its heart."

The person who decided to do something about it was Priya Shah, who had moved to Kettlesby from Manchester three years earlier and still described herself as a newcomer. She had read about a village in Devon where the local shop had been saved by its own customers. The building had been bought with money that was raised by selling shares to the people who lived there. Each share cost a hundred pounds, and everyone who bought one became a part-owner.

A meeting was organized in the village hall. Priya expected about thirty people. More than two hundred came, and the chairs ran out long before the meeting started. A committee was formed that night, and a plan was agreed: the building would be bought by the village, the bakery would be run as a community business, and a young baker would be hired and trained by Margaret before she retired.

The next eight weeks were the busiest in Kettlesby's history. Posters were put up in every window. Letters were written to every former resident whose address could be found. A story about the campaign was published in a national newspaper, and the next morning hundreds of emails were received from people who had never been to Yorkshire but wanted to help. A retired farmer bought forty shares with money that had been saved, he said, for a new tractor he no longer needed.

Not everything went smoothly. The landlord had already been contacted by the company from Leeds, and for a while it looked as if the village's offer would be rejected. The deadline was extended once, and then a second time. At one meeting, tempers were lost and two members of the committee stopped speaking to each other for a week. But by the end of May, the money had been raised: more than four hundred thousand pounds, from over nine hundred people.

The sale was completed on a Friday in June. That evening, Margaret baked what everyone had been calling the last loaf, the final one she would make as owner. It was carried up the main street by her great-granddaughter and presented to Priya on the steps of the village hall, while most of Kettlesby applauded and several people cried.

As it turned out, it was not the last loaf at all. The bakery is now owned by the village, and it is run by a young baker called Josh, who was trained by Margaret for six months. Margaret still comes in on Saturday mornings, officially as a customer, although she has been seen more than once with her hands in the dough.

The bread is still being made in the same old ovens, in more or less the same way. And above the counter, in a wooden frame, there is a list of every single person who bought a share. It is read, the villagers say, by almost every visitor who comes in for a loaf.