Grasmere Gingerbread

Heading to the Lake District in northwest England, it takes about two hours and forty minutes to take the intercity express train from London Euston Station. Transfer to the Windermere Line at Oxenholme Lake District Station and take 20 minutes train ride to Windermere Station, the gateway to the Lake District.　In addition to the lakes that give it its name, the Lake District also has mountains, rivers, waterfalls and a coastline – all connected by meadows where sheep leisurely graze. 

Wordsworth, a romantic poet, spent most of his life here and left behind many works. Furthermore, Beatrix Potter, the author of the Peter Rabbit picture book series, visited this place for a summer getaway with her family when she was 16 years old, and was fascinated by this place. At the age of 39, she used the money she earned from her picture book to purchase Hill Top Farm in the village of Near Sawrey. Afterwards, she moved from London and ran a sheep farm here until her death at the age of 77, devoting herself to preserving the natural environment.

Think of the illustrations from Beatrix Potter's beautiful little picture books. The setting for the stories of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten and others is still the same today.  

About 170 years ago, in the village of Grasmere in the Lake District, a fascinating gingerbread with a mysterious texture and taste that no one had eaten before was born.

Sarah Nelson baked board-shaped gingerbread that was neither as soft as a cake nor as hard as a biscuit. Its exquisite texture melted in the mouth, and it had a strong ginger flavor.

The gingerbread’s reputation grew quickly along with its sales. This was the birth of Grasmere Gingerbread, which continues today.

Both a cake (block) type of gingerbread and thin biscuit type of gingerbread were already popular in this region at that time, but Sarah’s plate-shaped gingerbread quickly became known as “Grasmere” gingerbread.  Since then, the gingerbread tradition has been passed down with great care, and this area is now known as the “Mecca of Gingerbread.”

Sarah Kemp to Sarah Nelson

Sarah Kemp (her maiden name) was born in 1815 into a poor family in Bowness, a village on the shore of Lake Windermere. Her father died when she was young, and she lived with her mother and a sister who was seven years older than her.  While raising her children, her mother made a living by working in the kitchen of a wealthy family.

Young Sarah attended elementary school and grew up working hard, helping with household chores, and also helping out with livestock and other chores at a nearby farm. Although Sarah’s mother was busy trying to make a living, she never forgot to teach her daughters how to manage all household chores.

When employed as a maid at an upper-class private residence, Sarah learned the work style and etiquette from the older maids, eventually getting hired as a cook for a private residence in Kendal. There, Sarah's cooking skills, which produced delicious and original dishes one after another, became well-received, and she was invited as a chef to a mansion in Penrith , a market town about 40 km north of Kendal.

It was in this town that love blossomed in Sarah.

In 1844, she married sharecropper Wilfred Nelson. The two soon moved to the prosperous commercial town of Lancaster, where her husband Wilfred started selling tea and running a greengrocer’s business. Their first son, John, was born in 1846, followed by two daughters, Mary Ann and Dinah, in 1848 and 1850. Wilfred’s greengrocer was thriving, and the Nelson family seemed to have found stability and happiness. However, that was short-lived... In 1852, their eldest son John fell ill with cholera and died within weeks,despite Sarah's desperate attempts to nurse him back to health.   The heartbroken couple had lost their 5-year-old son...

At this time, there was no complete sewage system, and many people lost their lives to cholera in overcrowded cities due to poor sanitation. Fearing that cholera would take their remaining two daughters, the Nelson family decided to move to Grasmere.

At Home in Grasmere 

Grasmere is a beautiful village, blessed with clean air, rolling hills, lakes and clear streams of water.  Wordsworth, one of Britain's leading Romantic poets, spent his happiest and most prolific years here, praising it as “The loveliest spot that man hath ever found.”

In fact, Wordsworth had passed away just two years before the Nelson family moved to live in Grasmere.  Although his search for work in Grasmere, far from the neighboring cities, did not go as planned, Wilfred found work as a grave-digger in St Oswald’s churchyard and laboured as a construction worker, while Sarah worked as a housekeeper.

The two daughters settled into the local school and were able to lead a simple but healthy and happy life.

(Left) St. Oswald’s Church     ,    (Right) Clear stream flowing across the road

Soon after, Sarah was praised for her work style and cooking skills, and was welcomed to Dale Lodge in the center of Grasmere village, the villa where Lady Mary Farquhar, the daughter of Duke Robert Farquhar, lived. Sarah served Lady Mary as an assistant chef for French cuisine, making party food and served the meal for the duke’s daughter.

Sarah also began baking cakes and pastries at home, encouraged by the head chef at Dale Lodge – her gingerbread baking quickly gaining popularity with Duchess Marie and her guests.

Around this time, the Nelson family took up residence in Church Cottage, formerly used as a village schoolhouse.  This one-story building, built in 1630 with donations from villagers, was the village school until a larger school building was built nearby, at which time it was made available for rent to families in need. It became the home of the Nelson family.

Church Cottage was the building where Wordsworth once taught and where his son John also studied, and was adjacent to St Oswald’s Church, making it a convenient location for Wilfred, who worked in the church graveyard.

Pass through the stone gate beside Church Cottage and you will see the graveyard.　

Birth of Grasmere Gingerbread

In the winter of 1854, when she was able to balance work at Dale Lodge with her life and work at home, Sarah improved upon the popular gingerbread and created an attractive product that was different from biscuits and cakes.Her gingerbread had a texture and flavor that no one had ever tasted before and she named it “Grasmere Gingerbread”. In time, while continuing her work at Dale Lodge, Sarah began selling gingerbread wrapped in waxed paper from a stand on top of a tree stump in front of Church Cottage. The Lake District, and particularly Grasmere, had become a tourist honeypot, and before long, “Grasmere Gingerbread” became a souvenir confectionery that was famous throughout England.

The Lake District Becomes a Tourist Destination

Sarah’s lifetime, in the words of Joanne Hunter, current owner and director of Sarah Nelson’s Grasmere Gingerbread, spanned “a time of change.” The Industrial Revolution was progressing in Britain, and the railway network was spreading across the country, making it possible for steam locomotives to transport large numbers of people at once. Revolution had broken out in continental France just decades before, triggering a time of social and political instability that led people to look inwards – turning their sights to home and England. William Wordsworth’s poems in praise of the natural environment of the Lake District attracted the attention of many travellers who might hitherto have travelled farther afield; at the same time, the Lake District became a popular tourist spot that attracted people from urban areas.

The trainline that connects Oxenholme Lake District Station and Windermere Station is a single track affair nowadays, carrying passengers, disembarking them, carrying them again, and then returning.  As the main terminus for a popular tourist destination that welcomes tourists from all over the world, Windermere’s train station today gives off a sense of nonchalance . Built in 1847, the original station building is now home to Booths, a regional supermarket, while a more recent, infinitely more modest station building sits slightly apart from the original station building, providing access to the single train track. In the past, where Booths stands today, trains were dispatched to and from four platforms. When I listen to it , I can't immediately imagine the scene, but Sarah was alive at that time and started selling gingerbread.

(Left) Windermere Station　,　(Right) Northern Line trains

The left part of Windermere Station's station building is used as the station building, and the part where you can see the white letters Booths in the shade of the white birch trees is the supermarket. Equivalent to 6 railway lines...there was that much demand for it.

Supermarket, Booths 

Wordsworth loved and praised the Lake District

At the end of 1799, Wordsworth took up residence with his sister Dorothy at Town End, Grasmere in the tiny cottage which later became known as Dove Cottage. They spent nine years there, making space over the years for William’s wife Mary, their three children, and a whole host of visiting friends and family. This period was William’s most prolific and fulfilling period as a poet .

(Left) Dove Cottage

(Right) There are meadows on both sides of the road from Dove Cottage to St. Oswald’s Church, where, at the right time of the year, you can see adorable lambs with their mothers ♡. The head remains white, but the body of the lamb is black, and as it grows, it becomes light gray.

This is a Herdwick sheep, a breed native to the Lake District.

Wordsworth then moved from Town end to the parsonage, also in Grasmere. During that time he taught at Church Cottage, later to become the home of the Nelson family, his son John also attending the village school. In 1813, William moved to Rydal Mount in the nearby village of Rydal, where he lived with his family until his death in 1850 at the age of 80. In his later years, he had a grave prepared for himself and his family in the churchyard at St. Oswald’s, and it is here where he rests today.

Wordsworth’s poems were used as teaching materials in the 1820s and 1830s, and his fame reached its peak in the Victorian era. Even after his death, his popularity remained undiminished, aided by the idea of returning to nature that was born from the strains of the industrial revolution, and people continued to go to the places he praised and wrote about.

When many tourists came to visit Wordsworth's burial site, the aroma of Sarah’s gingerbread filled the air. Word of mouth quickly spread, and tourists visiting Wordsworth’s grave would stop by the Grasmere Gingerbread stand set up in front of Church Cottage, which stands in the corner of the churchyard, try some gingerbread themselves, then buy some as a souvenir.

Wordsworth family cemetery

On the Production and Sale of Grasmere Gingerbread

As the sales and reputation of her home-made gingerbread grew, Sarah made the decision to quit her job at Dale Lodge and concentrate on making and selling gingerbread. She was responsible for everything from purchasing materials to manufacturing, packaging, and sales. Sales were steady, until, in 1869, disaster struck again in the Nelson family home: first, when their second daughter, Dinah, suddenly passed away at the age of 18, and then in the following year, when their newly married eldest daughter, Mary Ann, died at the age of 22 – both daughters dying young from tuberculosis.

The Nelsons had already lost their young eldest son to cholera and now they had lost two beloved daughters. Bereft and deeply saddened, husband Wilfred drowned his sorrows in alcohol, becoming ill and unable to work properly, while  Sarah became the couple’s main breadwinner, devoting herself even more to making and selling her own gingerbread. When she saw someone eating gingerbread so deliciously, she felt happy and was able to overcome her difficulties.  Meanwhile, Sarah was looking forward to interacting with the villagers, especially the children, and taught them how to read and write by baking gingerbread with letters of the alphabet cut out. It may have been a way to comfort her in her grief over the loss of her child, and to express her gratitude to the villagers who had supported her life and business since her family moved to the village when she was young.

In 1880, after her husband Wilfred died at the age of 75, the Church Cottage was renovated and opened as Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread Shop.  Nearly 30 years had passed since the debut of “Grasmere Gingerbread” and in her later years, Sarah had come to be counted as one of the indispensable people in Grasmere Village. It is said that she always wore a white apron and a shawl and sat on a chair in front of Church Cottage.

Sarah in her later years (Source: Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread website)

As the 20th century approached, Sarah, by then over 80 years old, established herself as the manager of the Grasmere Gingerbread Shop, which continues today under the official name “Grasmere Village Church Cottage Confectioners”.

She kept her handwritten recipes in a safe at her local bank in Ambleside.

In 1901, King Edward ascended the throne upon the death of Queen Victoria.  Sarah passed away at the age of 88 in 1904, having witnessed the beginning of a new era.  Her funeral was packed with mourners, and her body was buried in the churchyard of St. Oswald’s, right next to the Church Cottage where she lived.

Sarah's grave in St. Oswald's Church

Blessed with three children, but predeceased by them, Sarah entrusted her shop to Agnes German, her great-niece, and Agnes’ sister, both of whom had cared for her in the months before her death.  After that, the family of William Wilson, a boy who was employed as a maid for this granddaughter, inherited Sarah's secret recipe and continued to run the business. Almost 120 years after her death, Sarah’s business is under the care of Joanne Hunter (née Wilson), director and third generation of the Wilson family.

When I visited for an interview in July 2024, I was greeted by the third generation director, Joanne Hunter. She was a woman with powerful eyes, a sparkling bright expression, and a cheerful aura, and she showed me around the shop. Moreover in a smooth, easy-to-hear, machine-gun conversation, she talked about her new approach to shop management and her vision for contributing to the local community.

＊Click here for the shop now...

 A close-up view of MsJoanne Hunter receiving the prestigious award

To this day, the Grasmere Gingerbread recipe is carefully preserved, and even now, it is said that only one person in the store knows Sarah’s recipe.   What makes Grasmere Gingerbread even more special is the adorable little 400-year-old building in which it is still made today, in much the same way as it was first made 170 years ago. Customers entering the shop find a board to their left in front of a gingham curtain: the board introducing Sarah’s life and the history of gingerbread.  The shop itself is on the right. Here, a variety of delicious gingerbread products are cutely displayed on shelves around a small space that can fit only a small number of people, among them shop assistants wearing huge siles of welcome and costumes that make you feel as if you have traveled back in time to the 19th century.

(Left) Shop entrance, （Center）A board with Sarah's life written on it, (Right) cute sales place

In July 2024, Joanne Hunter took me behind the scenes at Grasmere Gingerbread to reveal some of Sarah Nelson’s secrets.  The back of the shop houses a workshop – the gingerbread baking and cutting process in progress right behind Sarah’s board and gingham curtains!　　　

Richard, the bakery manager（left）, and Mike (right), who became a gingerbread maker after retiring from a bank, are both cheerful and above all, seem to be enjoying their work ♪

Three women who lived strong lives in the Victorian era

Queen Victoria, who ruled during England’s most glorious period, and Sarah, who expanded her business within the tailwind of that era.  While each of these women must surely have carried a heavy burden, gingerbread brought happiness to both of them. Although historical documents allows us a glimpse of only a small part of their lives, it is known that Christmas, the Queen's happiest time, was spent at the palace with her family, where a fir tree was prepared and decorated with gingerbread.  It is also said that the Queen gave a gingerbread to her dog Rush as a Christmas present.

On the other hand, Sarah supported her life with the gingerbread recipe she devised, and her Grasmere Gingerbread continues to be loved by generations to come, bringing happiness and courage to those who eat it.

There is another woman from the same era in the Lake District who lived a simple, strong and noble life.

Beatrix Potter gave dreams to children (and adults) all over the world with her story of Peter Rabbit, and contributed to the National Trust movement to protect and preserve the nature of the Lake District. Potter would have eaten Sarah's gingerbread too. She may even have bought it from Sarah herself.

Sarah Nelson and Beatrix Potter: two women who started a business with their own sense and ability, steadily built up that business, contributed to society, and left behind an immense legacy to the Lake District, their adopted home. The message “Bloom where you are placed” come to mind.

Queen Victoria, Sarah Nelson, and Beatrix Potter. These women of wildly different social and cultural backgrounds were born to different lives in different places, but each planted roots in the places they came to be in, lived independently, and lived with courage. I straighten my posture when I think of them and admire their way of living with integrity.

Sarah Nelson’s Grasmere Gingerbread Shop celebrated its 170th anniversary in 2024.

Congratulations on your 170th anniversary in 2024!

Inheriting tradition and new attempts

Almost 170 years after Sarah Nelson sold her first gingerbread outside Church Cottage, current owner Joanne Hunter continues Sarah's legacy, adding more contemporary experiments and plans. The company operates a mail-order business offering 160 products, including gingerbread, to customers around the world, and opened a sister store in Hawkshead Village in 2023. They actively participate in local conservation efforts and support the Rushbearing Gingerbread Ceremony, which preserves local cultural traditions.

＊Click here for information on Rush bearing Ceremony…

＊Click here for information about Hawkshead's sister store...