Location: 27 City Road, Winchester, SO23 8SD

Public transport/parking:

Web site: http://www.sweettreatco.co.uk/

Telephone number: 01962 808343

Date of visit: 10 October, 2009

Review:
Born in 1967, I spent quite a bit of my pocket-money during the 1970s in sweet-shops just like this one. Well, perhaps the shops of yesteryear were a little less colourful than this, and a bit less “polished” – more North-East England and less Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets Disneyland. But the rows and rows of jars of sweets—ranging across the palate of my childhood from wine gums to various flavours of sherbert to aniseed twists to fruit salads to midget gems to what used to be called sweet cigarettes to all sorts of licourice to you-remember-it-they’ve-got-it—are all the genuine article, delivered to the twenty-first century high street via some highly-sugared miracle of time-travel worthy of Tom Baker himself.

If you live in Winchester and have children, I recommend you take them as soon as possible. If you do not have children then no matter – go anyway. In fact, I think I enjoyed visiting this shop more than my son, aged seven. I left with a smile-inducingly large bag of wine gums—the original type, slightly hard unlike the feeble, too-soft imitation variety one usually finds in packets—while my son opted for a lolly pop about the size of his head. Children these days have no respect for traditional values, I am pleased to report. As I left the shop someone I know was driving past and caught my smile. He beamed back at me with complete understanding.

If you live elsewhere your inner child will have to make do with a virtual trip down memory lane by shopping on-line.

Before we left this splendid confectionery shop I told the owner it was quite possibly the best shop I’d visited in the last twenty-five years, and wished him well with his old-new business venture.

Damian@bottlesandcooks.com