Our 120 Year History
In the beginning…
Food in the late Victorian period was becoming increasingly industrialised and food contamination scares were frequent. Unscrupulous bakers were bulking out bread with sawdust and it was not totally uncommon to hear about substances like Arsenic being added to foods. The air was dirty and smoky. Housing was cramped. Illness was too common.
As a reaction to this, in Germany in the 1880s a movement called lebensreform (Life Reform) was born. This encouraged people to take a holistic approach to life. This meant eating nourishing foods, spiritual awareness, and plenty of exercise in the great outdoors – naked if you could get away with it.
Seeing a gap in the market for a store which only sold natural food, fabric merchant Carl Braun opened what is believed to be the first ever ‘health store’ or Reformhaus in Berlin in 1887. The movement took a while to reach the United Kingdom, but the first British health store opened in Birmingham in 1898. It was named after Sir Isaac Pitman (of shorthand fame) who was a vegetarian of 60 years standing who had died in 1897.
Health stores slowly spread across major town and cities of Britain…
‘Health Goods Depot’
The exact date that the Food Reform movement came to Hanover Street is imprecise. In the Post Office Directory of 1903, 40 Hanover Street was ‘Mrs Jack’s Haggis, Beef, and Ham Shop’. We believe that the marble shelf in our window dates to this period.
In the Directory published in May 1904 this had changed. Mrs Mary Bertram had taken over the property at a rent of £44 10s. Her occupation was listed as ‘Health Foods Dealer’, the shop was called ‘Health Goods Depot’. At some point between May 1903 and May 1904 what was probably Edinburgh’s first health food shop had been born.
No catalogues exist of the store from this period, but we know that Pitman’s in Birmingham as selling oats, grains, dried and fresh fruits, nuts, seeds, dairy products, as well as the first branded goods to appear on the market like ‘Albene Vegetable Butter for pastry’, Granose Biscuits and Flakes, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup!
Mrs Bertram changed the name of the business quite quickly to Health Goods Depot and continued trading until 1908/9, when the business was taken over by Edwin Rodbourn. In 1909 we weren’t even the only health food shop on Hanover Street. No. 73 Hanover Street was listed as a Health Food Store and Food Reform Restaurant.
In 1909 we see our first advert for the shop. It appears in the Reform Cookery Book by Mrs Mill and was published in Edinburgh by John Menzies. ‘Rodbourn’s Health Foods Depot’ was to appeal to ‘vegetarians, or intending vegetarians, should write or call for our list of over 400 varieties. We have the most varied stock of Health Foods in Scotland, and can give early delivery.’ Furthermore, ‘Remember, what a wrong diet causes a right diet will cure.’
The Rodbourn Health Food Empire
Although Edwin seemed content to have just one health food shop until the First World War, he then expanded with stores on Bruntsfield Place and Alvanley Terrace. As the Great War drew to a close, he opened his first bakery on East London Street and then Antigua Street. Clearly, he felt his passion was more baking than retail as in 1921 he sells the Hanover Street shop to Andrew Burnett and closes his Bruntsfield Place branch.
Rodbourn opens yet another bakery in Mayfield Place in 1930 and sadly dies in 1936 on Dundonald Street at which point his mini-empire has all closed or passed into new hands.
We were lucky enough to be contacted by a descendant of Edwin a few years ago which helped us to understand his background. Edwin was born in the Bristol area and was a lifelong Methodist. It was not uncommon for religious non-conformists to be drawn to trying to live a purer and more holistic life. They brought us a couple of postcards addressed to the shop in 1906 which suggests that Edwin may have had a connection to the business before he bought it.
The Ainslie/Friel Era
After about 12 years Andrew Burnett sells the business to Mr Robert Ainslie, a brewer from Musselburgh, whose family would then own the shop for 82 years. Little is known about Robert but from the late 1940s his daughter, Maggy, would run the shop. Maggy only died in 1998 and older customers will still remember her. A fiery, tiny tweed-clad lady with a penchant for Gaelic and fast cars. Colleagues in the trade remember her burning down Hanover Street in her Jaguar E-type.
In the early 1970s Maggie suffered a bad leg break and her son, Ainslie took over the running of the shop. It was Ainslie who came to define the shop as it is now and is responsible for its survival into the 21st Century. When Ainslie took over the shop, we were still receiving honey deliveries by the tonne and there were queues outside on the street to be served. Ainslie was perceptive enough to realise that, if the shop was going to survive in the city centre, with rising costs and the rise of supermarkets, it needed to specialise in the growing market for food and herbal supplements that required specialist advice and a wide range. And it is that gravitation to becoming specialists in natural health and nutrition which provided us with the tools to survive the next 50 years.
The 21st Century Dawns…
Shop front, 1993
The current owner, John, joined the business as a Saturday employee in 1994 and started managing the store for Ainslie in 1998. These were difficult times as competition proliferated, particularly with the rise of the internet. Ainslie retired in 2015 and John became only the seventh owner in over a century.
In 2016, John expanded the store into redundant office space. He began the rounding of the business into one which consolidated our strong position as the go-to place for supplements and advice. He also introduced a much wider range of natural and organic foods than we had previously had space for.
So here we are, having successfully navigated our second global pandemic since the Spanish Flu, two World Wars, and countless downturns and economic depressions.
Closing thoughts
We are the oldest business on Hanover Street. One of the oldest businesses in Edinburgh. And we are pretty confident that we are the oldest surviving health food store in the world. We are certainly the oldest in Europe having survived those stores in both Germany and the UK that started before us. Older businesses, not least the venerable Napiers founded in Edinburgh in 1860, almost invariably started life as herbalists or grocers, never and only ever a health store.
How did we survive? It’s a difficult question to answer but part of it is, as a small business, our ability to constantly evolve and change with the times. The length and depth of our knowledge is also a major factor. 2024 was not only the 120th anniversary of the shop but also John’s 30th anniversary. John overlapped with Ainslie for 20 years, Ainslie with his mother, and her in turn with her father. This is passed down to all staff so what you are looking at is a prism of collective knowledge of natural health practise which goes back nearly 100 years, just within the people in the business.
We are not the world’s most exciting shop, but we are able, through our knowledge and experience, to act as a filter for the inevitable fads and bandwagons that come along. And this is all we do. Our focus is on delivering that informed, honest, accurate advice with integrity. It is surely this factor which has made us the most trusted natural health business in Edinburgh for 120 years.
