I love old fashioned shops. I have a particular weakness for beautiful old fashioned sweetshops – and not just because I love eating sweets (my guilty secret: the white licorice round ones covered in little blue dots are my fave) but because they are reminiscent of a bygone era.

This one in Burford I came across in December – but haven’t had time to post about until now – is almost too picture perfect for words.

Living in the wilds of Scotland as a child, a trip to a proper sweet shop was something of a rarity…as was eating a sweet that wasn’t heavily tainted with the taste of polo mints from the rather ancient sweetie jar we had at home.

This perhaps explains why on seeing any half-decent looking sweet shop I still want to press my face up to its glass window before dashing inside.

The Burford Sweet Shop did not disappoint.  Jars upon jars of all the sweets you last ate when you were probably eight were neatly displayed on scrubbed, wide wooden shelves in glass jars stoppered with heavy glass lids…you know, the ones that make a delightful scraping sound as they’re opened.  The sound of a promise about to be delivered.

The names of all the sweets are also just as I remember them.  I can rest easy because the children of today can still buy a hot, sweaty handful of ‘liquorice wands’, ‘millions’ and ‘pips’ not forgetting a good old ‘dip dab’.

Whilst on the subject of nostalgia, albeit in a different form, I stumbled across a beautiful blog yesterday when I was writing about Bukit Brown. It’s called Remember Singapore.

So if your childhood memories are of places rather than sweet shops (mine are too but I didn’t grow up here so a lot of the old haunts are rather wasted on me as I never knew them first time around), then it makes for an amazing read.