Sixty-one years of fruit, then eleven of nothing
How a cannery on Wyndham Street stopped, sat empty with its machinery in place, and came back as a kitchen with eight card tables on the line.
What the building did first
It opened packing pears, added stone fruit in the fifties and ran three shifts a day through every summer until the last one.
When it shut, everything stayed: the belt, the sorter, the retort, the crib room upstairs with its kettle and its roster board. We kept the belt and the roster board and sold the rest.
Half our regulars worked here, and a fair number of them still call the bar the crib room. We have given up correcting them.
1948
Opened as a pear-packing shed with one line.
2009
Final batch, then eleven years locked.
2024
Reopened with tables where the packers stood.
Questions from former staff
Is the roster board still up?
Behind the bar, with the last week of 2009 still chalked on it.
Where did the retort go?
Scrapped in 2022. It weighed four tonnes and would not fit through anything.
Are the cans real?
Every one. Unfilled stock from the final run, never opened, never washed.
Can I find my old locker?
Third row, upstairs, if it had a number under sixty. They are still there.
Three things that do not change
- We buy from the valley first and from further afield only when the valley has nothing.
- No game on this floor is played for money, and no machine will ever be installed here.
- Anything we cannot cook in the changeover does not go on the board.