The Village School - Grasmere, Cumbria, UK.
N 54° 27.477 W 003° 01.418
30U E 498467 N 6034475
The Old Village School located on Church Stile in Grasmere is now the famous Gingerbread Shop.
Waymark Code: WM12FNK
Location: North West England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 05/17/2020
Views: 0
The building now home to the famous Gingerbread Shop was originally built in 1630 A.D. as the village school.
A plaque mounted on the wall of the building gives the following information;
"The Village School
The Rector and church wardens were among the pioneers of education for children of ordinary village folk. This small building, now the famous Gingerbread Shop, was the village school for over 220 years from its opening in about 1630 A.D. William Wordsworth and his wife and sister, who believed that universal education was the way for children to escape from poverty and ignorance, taught here in the early 19th century.
Village children today still attend the church primary school, across the River Rothay from the Parish Church."
The building became vacant after the construction of a new larger school nearby.
"Sarah Nelson and her husband Wilfred, moved into the quaint single storey building as its immediate proximity to St Oswald’s Churchyard was particularly handy for Wilfred who was retained as a gravedigger.
It was sometime in the winter of 1854 that Sarah perfected a recipe for a new spicy-sweet sensation that she named simply Grasmere Gingerbread.
Sarah began selling slices of Grasmere Gingerbread wrapped in parchment to villagers and tourists outside her neat home.
Officially registered as ‘None Genuine Without Trademark’, the launch of Grasmere Gingerbread® coincided with the development and expansion of the railways and the boom in Victorian visitors to the Lake District.
As the reputation of Grasmere Gingerbread grew, largely by word-of-mouth and tourists taking it home to bigger towns and cities, Sarah became confident enough to leave Dale Lodge and pour her energies into her new venture. A bold move and one which would more or less dictate the mixing, baking, wrapping and selling pattern of Sarah’s arduous everyday life for the next fifty years.
When she finally passed away in 1904, at the grand old age of 88, it was almost impossible for the inhabitants of Grasmere to imagine life without her. Sarah’s funeral service was packed with mourners and her community laid her to rest in St Oswald’s Churchyard, just a few yards from her beloved Church Cottage home and near the grave of poet William Wordsworth.
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