A Sweetshop Bag Rather Than a Grand Origin Tale
There does not appear to be a neatly sourced origin story for Shrimps and Bananas themselves, at least not one that should be dressed up as fact. So the honest story here is the story of the Barratt name on the modern packet, and the wider British sweetshop world it belongs to. These are not courtly chocolates with a ribboned legend. They are pocket-money sweets, the sort that lived in plastic tubs behind a counter, scooped into paper bags by weight, and eaten on the walk home before anyone could ask whether you had saved some.
The Barratt Name Comes Back Round
The Barratt brand name was brought back into active use in 2018, which explains why it still appears on packets of old-school sweets that feel older than many of the shops now selling them. The companyβs famous Wood Green factory site had closed in 1980 after a long decline, and that site has since been occupied by a creative complex called The Chocolate Factory, a name almost too tidy for the messiness of confectionery history. Albert Barratt, George Osborne Barrattβs youngest son, served as chairman and managing director from 1911 to 1921 and was knighted in 1922 for public services, which is a rather grand footnote for a family name now found on bags of foam bananas.
From Hoxton Sugar Boiler to British Sweet Memory
The older Barratt story begins in London in 1848, when George Osborne Barratt established Barratt and Co. in Hoxton. He started at 32 Shepherdess Walk with one sugar boiler, after earlier spells in a lawyerβs office and briefly as a pastry cook. In the early years, Barratt delivered and promoted his confectionery around London by pony and trap, which is the kind of detail that makes Victorian business sound both exhausting and oddly cheerful. The early range leaned heavily towards boiled sweets and toffees, before the firm expanded into the many categories that helped shape British childrenβs confectionery.
Wood Green, Sherbet, Chews and the Barratt Tangle
As the business grew, Barratt moved from Hoxton to a former piano factory on Mayes Road in Wood Green, with the first building ready in 1882. By 1906, the company was said to employ around 2,000 people and produce huge quantities of sweets each week. Later Barratt lines included Black Jack and Fruit Salad chews, which appeared in 1920, followed by the Sherbet Fountain in 1925. The brand later passed through other hands, including Bassettβs and Cadbury Schweppes, before becoming part of the portfolio now associated with Valeo Confectionery. Corporate family trees do like to get themselves into a knot, especially when sweets are involved.
Why British People Remember Them
Shrimps and Bananas belong to a very particular cupboard of memory. Not the biscuit tin at Christmas, not the respectable after-dinner mint, but the corner-shop bag. They recall pick and mix shelves, newsagents with slightly dusty windows, school holiday money, grandparents who somehow always had sweets somewhere, and the strange British belief that a pink foam shrimp is a perfectly normal thing to eat. For expats in Canada, that oddness is often the point. The sweet does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to be familiar in the exact daft way you remember.
A Small Bag of Home, Soft and Slightly Silly
There is something pleasingly unmodern about Barratt Shrimps and Bananas. They are bright, soft, fruity, and faintly absurd, which is a decent summary of half the British sweet aisle if we are being honest. For anyone who grew up with them, the appeal is not complicated. Open the bag and you are somewhere near a sweetshop counter again, trying to make 50p go further than it reasonably could. The Great British Shop keeps that sort of memory within reach, which is just as well, because nobody wants to explain pink shrimps to customs more than once.
