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A nice little documentary was just shown on BBC 4 about R Balson, butchers, who have been operating in Bridport since 1515.

They have a US branch run by a cousin. Apparently he gets a lot of trouble with government forms that ask when the business was established.

http://www.rjbalson.co.uk/redirect/welcome.php?from=US

Buy some bangers today!

BBC online article about the company.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25711108

Pretty cool stuff! I love how they can trace their lineage to almost 500 years ago. Wish I could do that with my family!

Wow... 500 years old. That store is older then the country I live in. That's a bit of a head spinner.

 mega_bassist wrote:
Pretty cool stuff! I love how they can trace their lineage to almost 500 years ago. Wish I could do that with my family!

You probably can, 500 years is only 25 generations. More often than not, the annoying thing is that family names change over time.

Penn (of Penn and Teller) has a web-show.
He visited London a while ago and bought a hat. When he looked inside at the label, it listed the maker's info, and the year the company was established.
The company that made the hat has been around longer that his country. They probably made hats that were amongst the first to be taken across the Atlantic, and he had just bought one made by the same people.
So, even though it was new, and bought 'abroad', he'd just acquired some American history.

 Skinnereal wrote:
Penn (of Penn and Teller) has a web-show.
He visited London a while ago and bought a hat. When he looked inside at the label, it listed the maker's info, and the year the company was established.
The company that made the hat has been around longer that his country. They probably made hats that were amongst the first to be taken across the Atlantic, and he had just bought one made by the same people.
So, even though it was new, and bought 'abroad', he'd just acquired some American history.

That's pretty cool, as is the 500 year old butcher shop!

My company is over 100 years old and invented sheetrock, so that's cool.

My grandparents owned a house house that was build in 1670something...

Crap, and I'm impressed when I got to some of my friends houses that are 200-300 years old...

My house is 18 years old. Ancient!

It was in terrible shape, so they had to get rid of it. The taxes were stupid on it: it was worth $20,000 due to the condition, but appraised at $250,000 due to the potential for it, so they would have had to pay taxes on the higher amount...or something like that.

My wife and I seriously considered moving back to Germany for that house and living in it while fixing it up and then renting out the apartments.

 kronk wrote:


My company is over 100 years old and invented sheetrock,

Like Nickelback or Limp Bizkit one assumes ?

No, that's gak Rock.

Sheetrock is this gak, also called Wall Board (generic name).

I heard about a US hotel that billed itself as historic.
When it was due to JFK having stayed there, it lost some of its oomph.
Of historic interest, yes.
Historic itself, not really.

Age and history is a problem though. Just try improving traffic-flow through a UK city. It took me an hour to drive 5 miles into Oxford last week. The view wasn't that great either, with huge stone walls and lines of vehicles all I could see.

It's interesting to note that around where I am a lot of village shops are gone - closed up and moved on years ago. However several villages still have their butcher. There seems to be something in the economise and social view about a butchers that makes them profitable and long lasting above many other shops.



On the subject of old houses our house is 400 odd years old houses is a nightmare for insulation (mostly because if you don't have thatch there isn't any insulation); plus plaster! Modern plaster is all hard and rigid - old houses; they move around a bit and if you don't get the right plaster it ends up shattering and breaking up everywhere with huge cracks

Oh and if you're in the attic during strong wind you can hear every gust and the whole house creeks!

The other downside is that you'll never be able to get used to modern housing - the walls just look wrong when its one huge blank sheet of plaster and paint without any wooden supports!

Oh and nothing beats a proper open fire in winter (at least when you get proper winter when its properly cold outside as opposed to this year where, so far, its mostly been damp )

I have a semi-adopted grandmother who was one of the crew who designed and built the original neon Rose Bowl sign (I have no doubt that it's since been replaced/repaired after it was put up in the 20s or whenever.

It's not so much cool knowing that someone did something cool like that, it's more hearing the stories of the old folk who DID that stuff that, to me, is supremely interesting.

 kronk wrote:
No, that's gak Rock.

Sheetrock is this gak, also called Wall Board (generic name).

..hmm..... I think it'd be more fun to put nails in Fred Durst but this would be easier to paint one supposes.

It's actually oddly satisfying to hang a piece of wall board, but I digress.

Old companies are cool. However, I thought the oldest business anywhere would either be politics or prostitution.

My parent's house was originally build in 1897. It was a one room house with a chimney. I helped them update/renovate it, and it was cool because you would see when each additional room was added onto the house. My favorite was finding the newspapers from the mid-1960's we found. Cadillacs for $3000! JFK giving speeches! Really neat stuff.

 kronk wrote:
It's actually oddly satisfying to hang a piece of wall board,

You Americans and your crazy euphemisms !


Friend of mine used to be a tour guide at the Cathedral, one of the "highlights" was/is

http://www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk/#/old-door/4579044334 ( link is now somewhat broken, alas, so no images )

This door can be found in the north aisle of the cathedral choir. It is constructed from four vertical panels of oak and overall measures 6 ft 5 ins high and 2 ft 9 ins across. It leads to a staircase that was built in the time of Lanfranc (1070s) which led to the former chapel of St Blaise. The wood has been dated by dendrochronology (tree rings analysis) to around 1180 but the metalwork is more problematic. The large 'C' clasps seem to be the work of Lanfranc (1070s) but the horizontal straps, with surface cross-hatching, appear to be the work of 1180s. A plausible scenario is that the door was partially destroyed in the fire of 1074, the 'C' clasps were re-used after the fire, but strengthened with new horizontal straps.

My chum had this job for three or four years and it was reported by him and several of his colleagues that at least once per "season" one tourist would loudly whistle/similar sign of disbelief and then ask if that meant that Jesus might have touched this door.

Our local Waterstones ( bookshop chain) has some odd bits of history too

http://waterstonescanterbury.co.uk/?page_id=5

The spring that fed the bathhouse causes some issues with damp at times today.

Less impressed by the " Our escalator is one of the oldest working escalators in Europe. It was made in 1985 by German firm O&K at their factory in Keighley, West Yorkshire " but YMMV

Half a Millennium.... madness...

Here was me thinking the British Museums 255th Anniversary was impressive. (It still is, but 500 year old Butchers tops it!)

 kronk wrote:
prostitution.

Yeah, I was disappointed too.

500 years is pretty good.

Our local butchers are relative newcomers; established 1829, they're just a bit younger than our house...

That's a great picture. Good to hear that they are still in business!

Does the shopfront still look the same? (Minus the pigs, naturally )

They've moved down the street, to two smaller buildings which I imagine are older than the one pictured, later 1600s or early 1700s, woodframed... and kinda plain looking, in a good way, white interior, fluorescent lights, all in this slightly saggy, tilting building.

The school I went to is about 1000 years old.

Holy cow crap thats an old business. I bet there isnt a thing about butchering they couldnt tell you about

 KingCracker wrote:
Holy cow crap thats an old business. I bet there isnt a thing about butchering they couldnt tell you about

Can you imagine, sitting at Christmas dinner when "little Jimmy" who is 17 pipes up with "I don't want to be a butcher when I leave school"

 Medium of Death wrote:
Here was me thinking the British Museums 255th Anniversary was impressive. (It still is, but 500 year old Butchers tops it!)

The Museum was actually founded by Act of Parliament in 1753, so we've been around longer than 255 years. That's the anniversary of our opening, though.

/pedant off

Had a word with my local butcher today. They have been trading out of their shop for 150 years though not with the same family all the time. I think a lot of them were killed in the Great War.

There's a well-known brewery in the Netherlands that dates back to 1340. Well, it's well-known in the Netherlands. No, it's not Heineken.
An even older one exists in Poland, I believe, but I don't recall the name.