UK's 'best' department store hidden in pretty market town owned by family for 254 years

One of the main aims of any business is longevity, and it's safe to say a department store in the heart of Norfolk has achieved that tenfold. Bakers & Larners, hidden away in the pretty market town of Holt, has been owned by the same family for over 250 years - meaning they've survived and thrived across four centuries and under the reigns of 10 different monarchs.

It has been trading from its historic home at 8 Market Place since around 1810, but the Bakers first became involved in the 1770s. Over the years, they continued to diversify, adapt their practices, and expand their revenues to meet the demands of a continuously changing world, weathering economic shifts and societal challenges, including recessions and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bakers & Larners began as a humble ironmongery and went on to evolve into various different incarnations, namely blacksmithing, brewing, gunsmithing, selling sporting goods, heating engineers, drainage contractors, and even agricultural machinery.

Today, however, it is a 41,000sqft department store that sells everything you could imagine, from fine wines to furniture and, of course, its famous Christmas hampers.

Keeping in touch with its roots, the shop continues to use one of its 17th-century wine cellars, which had been lost for generations.

It employs around 80 people, all of whom are based in the north of Norfolk, though the wider CT Baker Group - which the store is a part of - accounts for 215 employees across its portfolio, which includes two supermarkets and four builders' merchant depots, all nested within northern Norfolk.

Famously, amid the difficulties arisen through the pandemic in 2020, the family suffered a devastating fire to its Budgens store which left the town without a supermarket and its only post office.

But Bakers & Larners would band together with the community to re-open the post office within just five days, while an interim grocery store was set up in the car park to meet the needs of their local customers.

Now, it is being led by managing director Nick Baker and directors Malcolm Baker and Felicity Baker-Attew, and they continue to expand their influence in Norfolk even more.

The family, on top of the aforementioned Budgens, which was acquired in 2007, added Bettys furniture and clothing store to its offering in 2004, but their commitment to the department store that started it all remains steadfast.