The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)

Frank Fisher, now 90, was a traditional high street butcher his whole working life – as were three generations of his family before him. How does a man dedicated to serving his community decide when it’s time to hang up his white coat? By Tom Lamont

Frank Fisher’s butcher’s shop had been in business, he liked to tell people, for more than 300 years. A while back, a signpainter was commissioned to advertise this fact on an outside wall, in case any strangers should pass through the market town of Dronfield in Derbyshire and feel compelled to stop and inspect a time capsule. When I first visited, in January 2018, I found a low, square-windowed room tiled in faded beige and blue. Most of the interior was taken up by a walk-in meat larder, with just enough room left over for a counter, a crimson-stained cutting block and Frank himself. Saws and cleavers dangled, ominously, at throat height; you had to be careful not to impale yourself on the hooks that curled down from a black-lacquered carcass beam. Frank, who was 88 that year, moved with grace around the cramped space, having first come to work here as a teenager. When I asked how much had changed over the past 75 years, he took a good long look around and said: “The weighing scale used to be over there, love.”

In some respects, Frank’s was like any number of small shops in Britain. It had once been essential to the local community, depended-on. And now it was marginal, perishing in plain sight as the people of Dronfield chose to buy their goods in one of a trio of supermarkets, or to have deliveries brought to them by van. Open at 9am sharp, Frank had waited until 11.30am for his first visitor of the day – and here I came, not with an empty shopping basket, but a reporter’s notebook. I’d read about his shop in the Yorkshire Evening Post, and about how Frank was refusing to shut, even as his strength declined and he struggled to keep the lights on. His was the last butcher’s shop in the middle of town. The last traditional shop on the main road. He was the last butcher in an ancient family of them, and he insisted that he wasn’t ready to hang up his white coat just yet.

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