Davy’s Fried Fish Shop at Beamish

12th July 2011

Categories: Visitor News

Davy’s Fried Fish Shop at Beamish will be open to visitors from Friday 15 July, serving a real taste of the past and is expected to be hugely popular with the 420,000 people who visit Beamish every year.

The Fried Fish Shop has been named in honour of the brothers’ shop which traded in Winlaton Mill for seventy years.  The business was set up by their grandfather in 1937, then run by their mother and father before being operated by Brian and Ramsay themselves until 2007.

No picture of pit village life in the north east is complete without a fish & chip shop.  In Edwardian times they thrived in working class areas, drawing in people with a sociable atmosphere full of gossip, popular with women, children and young lads.  With evening opening and eat-in areas they were particularly attractive to courting couples in the days before pubs and cinemas welcomed women !

Davy’s Fried Fish Shop has been built in The Pit Village at Beamish in the heart of the community, close to the Methodist chapel and the Board school.  It is typical of a type found throughout the region, which often began life as Victorian commercial buildings and were later converted to the new role. 

The project has been developed by local craftsmen working together with Beamish curators.  The building was constructed by local builder, stonemason and bricklayer Kenny Bowen from Etherley, near Bishop Auckland, who has worked on many other projects at the Museum.  He used reclaimed local materials, red wire cut bricks typical of the area, along with bricks from Howdon Colliery and East Hetton Colliery.  Kenny laboured throughout the winter of 2010,  in some of the most severe weather we have seen for many years, to ensure that the building kept to schedule.

Once the shell was complete, work on the interior began.  Walls were tiled in typical fashion with beautiful decorative panels from Cowes Fish & Game Shop in Berwick upon Tweed and the original counter from Davy’s in Winlaton Mill installed.

On entering, visitors encounter a succession of ranges dating from 1910, the 1920s and the 1930s.   In the main room, where fish & chips are fried and sold, there’s a 1920s range by Mabbott of Manchester.  This range was used until the 1960s in a small village near Chester.  It’s greatest historical association was during WW2 when locally stationed GIs regularly ‘borrowed’ it to cook thousands of doughnuts for their homesick countrymen. 

The third range was made by Nuttalls around 1934 and reflects the huge growth in the business before WW2.  This range remained in use until 2007 at the Davy’s Chip Shop at Winlaton Mill, near Gateshead.  The delicious Beamish fish & chips are fried in the Nuttalls and Mabbott ranges, in real beef dripping, then wrapped in specially printed newspaper, of course !  There’s a choice of where to eat too – either in the adjacent Saloon, with scrubbed pine tables and benches or in the sunshine at picnic tables just outside.

Richard Evans, Museum Director, said “Davy’s is an exciting addition to the Museum, telling more of the story of North Eastern pit village life in Edwardian times.  It’s a chance for visitors to reminisce while enjoying a real taste of the past - we hope they will agree this really is Beamish at its best.”

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