ALL good things come to an end – so say stalwart shop owners Ian and Joyce Appleyard who are retiring at the end of the month.
The couple, from Aldbrough St John, have been familiar faces on Barnard Castle’s high street for the past two decades, running The Hayloft, a grocers-cum-vintage and antiques emporium in Horsemarket.
The pair took over the business from David and Maureen Atkinson in 2004 when Mr Appleyard was made redundant from his farming job.
Mrs Appleyard said: “I have been here since 1989 as I was doing a lot of machine knitting and I had a stall in the back and Ian was doing his hand-carved walking sticks. I was helping David and Maureen in the shop as well.”
Mr Appleyard added: “When I was made redundant David had been talking about giving up so we thought ‘why don’t we take it on’, so we did.”
The shop, which sells everything from fresh oranges to vintage farming implements, has been popular with residents and tourists throughout the years. During the pandemic they had to take on staff to help cope with the demand from existing and new customers looking for baking ingredients.
Mrs Appleyard said: “At the outset of the pandemic we were buying in 16kg bags of flour and bagging down. The demand for flour was amazing.
“We were so busy we had to hire someone in to help us and we nicknamed him Avery, after the scales, as he was constantly having to lift and weigh the flour.
“We had a huge list of customers who wanted flour and fresh yeast.”
Mr Appleyard, 75, said they had not been intending to retire but the lease on the building at Horsemarket has not been renewed.
He added: “The building at the back needs quite a lot of work doing to it to bring it up to standard and the landlord needs to sort it out.
“If we could have found somewhere else suitable in town to carry on, we would have. But all good things have to come to an end, I suppose.”
