The once-ubiquitous National Milk Bars, a staple of UK high streets in the mid-20th century, are facing extinction. Only one branch remains, in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, and its owner, Alisan San, is battling to keep the iconic brand alive.
Walk around any UK town centre and you are likely to find at least one of the major coffee shop chains' estimated 4,000 outlets. While the chain was never of a scale anything like that of Starbucks, Caffé Nero or Costa Coffee, it was, for a time, a staple of high streets across the north-west of England and Wales.
Upon buying the café in the Port Arcades shopping centre, Alisan San had no idea that he was not only trying to keep a business afloat, but was taking on the challenge of keeping a brand alive as well.National Milk Bars were the brainchild of Welsh dairy farmer Robert 'Willie' William Griffiths. In the early 1930s, the milk bar phenomenon reached London from the USA. Griffiths saw glasses of milk being sold over smart counters for a few pence a glass, and decided to take the concept back home to Wales. Griffiths and his wife Florence opened the first National Milk Bar in Colwyn Bay in 1933, and ran the chain from the Woodlands farm in Forden, near Welshpool, for a number of years.In their heyday there were 17 National Milk Bars dotted across Wales and the north-west of England, selling dairy-based treats including milkshakes and cream cakes. Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham were all home to a National Milk Bar, and the Liverpool branch – once said to have been paid a visit by the Beatles – is immortalised on the façade of a building on Lime Street that replaced the demolished Futurist cinema. But as tastes changed, so did National Milk Bars' fortunes. And but for the Ellesmere Port outlet, the brand would be consigned to the history books.The Liverpool National Milk Bar is said to have welcomed The Beatles 'You come in and you feel as though you're amongst friends,' says regular customer Joy. 'Everybody knows each other by name'. 'We are here every day, every day bar Sunday,' says Mavis. 'Hopefully we are not going to lose this. Hopefully this will keep going'.Owner Alisan was a chef before he bought the last surviving National Milk Bar. The 45-year-old may have changed the menu and modernised the interior a little, but the signage on the front is the same as it was when the branch opened when the shopping centre was built in the 1980s.Now it faces competition from the major high street brands, with a Caffe Nero having taken up one of the units in the Port Arcades.'For some people, it is more than a coffee shop,' he says. Parking charges 'another thing to worry about
Business National Milk Bars Ellesmere Port Coffee Shop Brand Survival Historic Businesses
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