Atkinsons History
History
180 years old and still young at heart. As we approach our bicentennial Atkinsons is sitting on a wealth of tea & coffee heritage, the like of which just can’t be invented. It’s in our brand DNA to take the long view, which means looking for sustainable relationships with suppliers and doing our part to be kinder to the environment, so that we can still be here tomorrow enjoying a coffee together…
When we took up the baton as Guardians of the Flame back 2005 we took our custodianship of this much-loved local institution very seriously and still feel this responsibility every day when we open our doors to the steady stream of customers old and new. The shop and Roastery were just about ticking over after a long period of continuous trading for 168 years. When the young Thomas Atkinson opened his Grasshopper Tea Warehouse in 1837 there were already 6 other Tea Merchants in the bustling west-facing port of Lancaster. Now there was only one. One last link to the city’s distant, sometimes glorious, sometimes infamous maritime past, clinging on by its fingernails to the cliff edge of mercantile obscurity, an abyss littered with failed businesses, victims of unscrupulous dealings or commercial ineptitude and hope-filled start-ups that had succumbed to the ravages of changing trends, resulting in piles of obsolete products. Atkinsons stuck to its guns, no compromise of quality, through two world wars and regular recessions and depressions on the world markets. One market remained strong, a staple that was also an affordable luxury, the demand for a really good cup of tea or coffee and it was not just an everyday necessity but several times a day!
When we took over Atkinsons Coffee, there were just two part-time staff and a manager, who had been there for 50 years. Like a goldfish in a small pond the business had grown to a size limited by its habitat and occupants. But it was in danger of becoming fossilised. The charm of walking into a Dickensian time-warp was not lost on us. Indeed the very neglect that had taken hold became our greatest blessing. The previous owners very graciously left every artefact, every lock, stock and Jamaica Blue Mountain barrel for us to pick through. For the first couple of years we were still discovering various ephemera hidden away in nooks and crannies. It was like embarking on a project of Retail Archeology!
From this comfortable low plateau we were about to embark on a scarily steep North Easterly direction on the graph of Business Growth. We spent the first few years promising concerned regulars that nothing was going to change in their beloved Atkinsons, all the while making subtle improvements to the fabric of the place and buffing up its best assets, that they might be seen in a better light. Behind the scenes more dramatic progress was happening to the structure of the business. On the Wholesale front we were pushing back at the incursions into our territory made by competitors who had enjoyed a clear field for the past 20 years or so. Business, like Nature, abhors a vacuum and the one around us had been filled by an assortment of hungrier, more predatory outfits!